← Fame through time1970-1979
The 1970s
Whose names filled the books of the 1970s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in Chinese books during the 1970s, whenever they lived.
- 1
Mao Zedong596 - 2
Liu Shaoqi266 - 3
Lin Biao235 - 4
Lu Xun177 - 5
Zhou Enlai104 - 6
Deng Xiaoping69 - 7
Confucius36 - 8
Sun Yat-sen28 - 9
Jiang Qing25 - 10
Zhu De19 - 11
Cao Xueqin12 - 12
Laozi7.1 - 13
Wang Anshi5.7 - 14Gao Ming5.6
- 15
Yuan Shikai5.5 - 16
Kang Youwei5.0 - 17
Liu Zongyuan4.4 - 18
Kim Il-sung4.3 - 19Wang Chong4.3
- 20
Yan Fu4.1 - 21
Hong Xiuquan4.0 - 22
Park Chung-hee3.9 - 23
Dong Zhongshu3.8 - 24
Wang Fuzhi3.1 - 25
Zhuang Zhou3.0
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1970s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Pope Francisnot measured- - 2
Joe Biden4 decades - 3
Elvis Presley7 decades - 4
Bob Dylan6 decades - 5
Ali Khamenei4 decades - 6
Bruce Lee5 decades - 7
Stephen Hawking4 decades - 8
John Lennon6 decades - 9
Muhammad Ali8 decades - 10
Saddam Hussein6 decades - 11
Paul McCartney6 decades - 12
Muammar Gaddafi2 decades - 13
Robert De Niro5 decades - 14
Woody Allen6 decades - 15
Pelé3 decades - 16
Al Pacino5 decades - 17
Jack Nicholson5 decades - 18
Bernie Sanders3 decades - 19
Harrison Ford4 decades - 20
Morgan Freeman3 decades - 21
George Harrisonnot measured- - 22
Chuck Norris4 decades - 23
Jane Fonda6 decades - 24
Jimi Hendrix5 decades - 25
14th Dalai Lamanot measured-
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.