← 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 English books during the 19th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus94 - 2
Homer15 - 3
Cicero13 - 4
Augustus13 - 5
Plato10 - 6
Virgil9.6 - 7
Aristotle9.4 - 8
Socrates6.4 - 9
Herodotus6.2 - 10
Plutarch5.6 - 11
Ovid4.2 - 12
Strabo4.1 - 13
Charlemagne3.9 - 14
Demosthenes3.8 - 15
Lord Byron3.6 - 16
Livy3.4 - 17
Origen3.1 - 18
Cleopatra3.0 - 19
Xenophon3.0 - 20
Walter Scott3.0 - 21
Tertullian2.7 - 22
James II, Count of Urgell2.6 - 23
Robert Peel2.6 - 24
Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor2.6 - 25
Pericles2.5
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 - 26
Edmund Husserl12 decades - 27
Herbert Spencer17 decades - 28
Thomas Robert Malthus8 decades - 29
Bernhard Riemann12 decades - 30
Ferdinand de Saussure12 decades - 31
Joseph Fourier11 decades - 32
Jean-François Champollion6 decades - 33
Heinrich Schliemann15 decades - 34
George Boole9 decades - 35
David Ricardo21 decades - 36
Francis Galton17 decades - 37
Alfred North Whitehead10 decades - 38
George Santayana9 decades - 39
Ludwig Feuerbach19 decades - 40
Vladimir Vernadsky8 decades - 41
Jacob Grimm21 decades - 42
Georgi Plekhanov11 decades - 43
Sofia Kovalevskaya14 decades - 44
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad4 decades - 45
Wilhelm von Humboldt22 decades - 46
Nikolai Lobachevsky9 decades - 47
Wilhelm Wundt15 decades - 48
Gottlob Frege9 decades - 49
Ernest Renan17 decades - 50
Charles Sanders Peirce9 decades - 51
Henry George19 decades - 52
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling9 decades - 53
Charles Fourier19 decades - 54
Vilfredo Pareto13 decades - 55
Vladimir Solovyov14 decades - 56
Theodor Mommsen18 decades - 57
Sophie Germain18 decades - 58
Vissarion Belinsky15 decades - 59
Vladimir Dal10 decades - 60
Syed Ahmad Khan8 decades - 61
Augustin-Louis Cauchy0 decades - 62
Franz Boas14 decades - 63
Dayananda Saraswati0 decades - 64
Gustave Le Bon15 decades - 65
John Herschel0 decades - 66
Thorstein Veblen11 decades - 67
Max Müller5 decades - 68
William Rowan Hamilton16 decades - 69
Hermann Minkowski9 decades - 70
Eliezer Ben-Yehudanot measured- - 71
Frédéric Bastiat18 decades - 72
Niels Henrik Abel1 decades - 73
Georg Simmel13 decades - 74
Karl Weierstrass8 decades - 75
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi1 decades - 76
Friedrich Schleiermacher21 decades - 77
Allan Kardec16 decades - 78
Andrey Markov6 decades - 79
Georges Sorel12 decades - 80
Oliver Wendell Holmesnot measured- - 81
Houston Stewart Chamberlain13 decades - 82
Alfred Marshallnot measured- - 83
François Arago18 decades - 84
Henri Fayol11 decades - 85
August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben6 decades - 86
Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet0 decades - 87
Felix Klein15 decades - 88
Pafnuty Chebyshev4 decades - 89
Karl Pearson14 decades - 90
Christian Doppler8 decades - 91
Richard Dedekind8 decades - 92
Muhammad Abduh5 decades - 93
Arthur Evans14 decades - 94
Louis Auguste Blanqui19 decades - 95
James George Frazer8 decades - 96
Bruno Bauer19 decades - 97
Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronetnot measured- - 98
Carl Menger14 decades - 99
Alfred Edward Housman0 decades - 100
Jean-Baptiste Say21 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.