← Fame through time1977
1977
Whose working lives fell in 1977. 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 1977, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Joe Biden4 decades - 2
Stephen Hawking4 decades - 3
Muhammad Ali8 decades - 4
Muammar Gaddafi2 decades - 5
Paul McCartney6 decades - 6
Harrison Ford4 decades - 7
Martin Scorsese5 decades - 8
Barbra Streisand6 decades - 9
Hu Jintao6 decades - 10
Aretha Franklin6 decades - 11
Ian McShane0 decades - 12
Isabel Allende4 decades - 13
Ted Kaczynski2 decades - 14
Eusébionot measured- - 15
Michael Crichton5 decades - 16
Michael Bloomberg2 decades - 17
Werner Herzog6 decades - 18
Lou Reed5 decades - 19
Ronnie James Dio0 decades - 20
Bob Hoskins4 decades - 21
Mitch McConnell4 decades - 22
Wen Jiabao5 decades - 23
Brian Wilson5 decades - 24
Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo4 decades - 25
Billy Connolly3 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.