← Fame through time1990
1990
Whose working lives fell in 1990. 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 1990, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Steve Jobs4 decades - 2
Pope Leo XIV0 decades - 3
Bill Gates4 decades - 4
Nicolas Sarkozy5 decades - 5
Bruce Willis4 decades - 6
Rowan Atkinson3 decades - 7
Kevin Costner3 decades - 8
Friedrich Merz3 decades - 9
Jair Bolsonaro0 decades - 10
Tim Berners-Lee3 decades - 11
Whoopi Goldberg4 decades - 12
Willem Dafoe3 decades - 13
Michel Platini5 decades - 14
Mariano Rajoy3 decades - 15
Li Keqiang4 decades - 16
Isabelle Adjani5 decades - 17
Viktor Tsoi3 decades - 18
Gary Sinise2 decades - 19
Billy Bob Thornton2 decades - 20
Angus Young0 decades - 21
Bill Paxton2 decades - 22
J. K. Simmons0 decades - 23
Akira Toriyama0 decades - 24
Ornella Muti5 decades - 25
Asif Ali Zardari3 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.