← Fame through time1900-1999
The 20th century
Whose names filled the books of the 20th 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 German books during the 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Thomas Mann6.1 - 2
Novalis5.5 - 3
Karl Marx4.7 - 4
Jean Paul4.3 - 5
Adolf Hitler2.6 - 6
Maria Theresa2.5 - 7
Max Weber2.5 - 8
Paracelsus2.5 - 9
Richard Wagner2.4 - 10
Friedrich Engels2.3 - 11
Friedrich Schlegel1.8 - 12
Erich Honecker1.7 - 13
Heinrich Mann1.7 - 14
Martin Luther1.6 - 15
Heinrich Heine1.6 - 16
Charles Augustus, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach1.5 - 17
Karl Kraus1.5 - 18
Walter Ulbricht1.4 - 19
Hans Sachs1.4 - 20
William IV, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel1.4 - 21
Gottfried Keller1.4 - 22
Rosa Luxemburg1.4 - 23
Gerhart Hauptmann1.4 - 24
Gustav Adolph, Duke of Mecklenburg-Güstrow1.3 - 25
Tannhäuser1.3
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 20th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Alan Turing4 decades - 2
Jane Goodall5 decades - 3
Noam Chomsky6 decades - 4
B. R. Ambedkar8 decades - 5
Albert Camus8 decades - 6
Srinivasa Ramanujan0 decades - 7
Hannah Arendt8 decades - 8
Jean-Paul Sartre9 decades - 9
Simone de Beauvoir8 decades - 10
Manmohan Singh5 decades - 11
Michel Foucault8 decades - 12
Jordan Peterson0 decades - 13
Bertrand Russell13 decades - 14
T. E. Lawrence10 decades - 15
John Forbes Nash Jr.0 decades - 16
Ludwig Wittgenstein8 decades - 17
John von Neumann4 decades - 18
Muhammad Yunus3 decades - 19
Martin Heidegger10 decades - 20
Antonio Gramsci9 decades - 21
Milton Friedman9 decades - 22
John Maynard Keynes10 decades - 23
Dietrich Bonhoeffer8 decades - 24
Jürgen Habermas8 decades - 25
Billy Graham7 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.