← 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 coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Steve Jobs4 decades - 2
Pope Leo XIV0 decades - 3
Bill Gates4 decades - 4
Bruce Willis4 decades - 5
Nicolas Sarkozy5 decades - 6
Rowan Atkinson3 decades - 7
Kevin Costner3 decades - 8
Friedrich Merz3 decades - 9
Whoopi Goldberg4 decades - 10
Jair Bolsonaro0 decades - 11
Willem Dafoe3 decades - 12
Tim Berners-Lee3 decades - 13
Isabelle Adjani5 decades - 14
Viktor Tsoi3 decades - 15
Michel Platini5 decades - 16
Li Keqiang4 decades - 17
Asif Ali Zardari3 decades - 18
Sergei Shoigu3 decades - 19
Billy Bob Thornton2 decades - 20
Gary Sinise2 decades - 21
Bill Paxton2 decades - 22
J. K. Simmons0 decades - 23
Angus Young0 decades - 24
Kelsey Grammer1 decades - 25
Gilbert Gottfried0 decades
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.