← Fame through time1972
1972
Whose working lives fell in 1972. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in 1972, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Saddam Hussein6 decades - 2
Jack Nicholson5 decades - 3
Morgan Freeman3 decades - 4
Jane Fonda6 decades - 5
Anthony Hopkins5 decades - 6
Dustin Hoffman6 decades - 7
Valentina Tereshkova6 decades - 8
Ridley Scott4 decades - 9
Bill Cosby6 decades - 10
Harald V of Norway0 decades - 11
Colin Powell4 decades - 12
Warren Beatty6 decades - 13
Bobby Charlton2 decades - 14
Vanessa Redgrave6 decades - 15
George Takei1 decades - 16
Thomas Pynchon5 decades - 17
Hunter S. Thompson4 decades - 18
George Carlin5 decades - 19
Andrei Konchalovsky0 decades - 20
Queen Sonja of Norway0 decades - 21
Madeleine Albright3 decades - 22
Yoshirō Mori0 decades - 23
Suzanne Pleshette3 decades - 24
Connie Francis5 decades - 25
Ratan Tata3 decades
How to read these rankings
- People sit in their own time. Everyone is placed in the century their working life belongs to, and never in one that came after their death.
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record, read across every language rather than one. 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. Those decades are closed, so each curve is measured once and kept.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, or a name belongs to more than one notable person, we would rather show nothing than guess.