← Fame through time1800-1899
The 19th century
Whose names filled the books of the 19th century - 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 19th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Zhu Xi870 - 2
Li Hongzhang149 - 3
Zhang Zhidong86 - 4
Zuo Zongtang43 - 5
Ban Gu40 - 6
Ge Hong40 - 7Chen Shou14
- 8
Mao Zedong12 - 9
Lu Xun11
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 19th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Karl Marx17 decades - 2
Friedrich Nietzsche15 decades - 3
Arthur Schopenhauer20 decades - 4
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel21 decades - 5
Ada Lovelace3 decades - 6
Søren Kierkegaard3 decades - 7
Carl Friedrich Gauss11 decades - 8
Swami Vivekananda13 decades - 9
Friedrich Engels17 decades - 10
Ralph Waldo Emerson19 decades - 11
Max Weber15 decades - 12
John Stuart Mill18 decades - 13
Charles Babbage20 decades - 14
Thérèse of Lisieux10 decades - 15
Ramakrishna14 decades - 16
Émile Durkheim11 decades - 17
William Jamesnot measured- - 18
David Hilbert14 decades - 19
John Dewey14 decades
- 20
Auguste Comte22 decades - 21
Henri Bergson12 decades - 22
Henri Poincaré13 decades - 23
Évariste Galois6 decades - 24
Georg Cantor14 decades - 25
Max Stirner18 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.