← 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 English books during the 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus30 - 2
Aristotle7.1 - 3
Plato7.1 - 4
Homer7.1 - 5
Augustus4.9 - 6
Johns Hopkins4.4 - 7
Cicero4.0 - 8
George Washington3.8 - 9
Socrates3.4 - 10
Virgil3.3 - 11
Abraham Lincoln2.0 - 12
Euclid1.9 - 13
Thomas Jefferson1.6 - 14
Ovid1.6 - 15
Mark Twain1.5 - 16
Plutarch1.5 - 17
Cleopatra1.4 - 18
Theodore Roosevelt1.4 - 19
Woodrow Wilson1.4 - 20
William Henry1.3 - 21
Benjamin Franklin1.3 - 22
Herodotus1.3 - 23
Charlemagne1.3 - 24
Rembrandt1.3 - 25
Euripides1.2
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 - 26
Katherine Johnsonnot measured- - 27
Slavoj Žižek1 decades - 28
Jiddu Krishnamurti1 decades - 29
Simone Weil9 decades - 30
Geoffrey Hinton0 decades - 31
Jeffrey Sachs4 decades - 32
Karl Popper7 decades - 33
W. E. B. Du Bois12 decades - 34
Alexander Dugin3 decades - 35
Kurt Gödel5 decades - 36
Dian Fossey4 decades - 37
Friedrich Hayek0 decades - 38
Judith Butler3 decades - 39
Bernie Madoff2 decades - 40
Alan Greenspan5 decades - 41
Mario Draghi3 decades - 42
Amartya Sen4 decades - 43
Theodor W. Adorno8 decades - 44
Walter Benjamin10 decades - 45
Janet Yellen2 decades - 46
Muhammad Iqbal4 decades - 47
Jacques Derrida6 decades - 48
Gilles Deleuze7 decades - 49
Pierre Bourdieu7 decades - 50
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.0 decades - 51
Sonia Sotomayor1 decades - 52
Daniel Kahneman4 decades - 53
Paul Krugman4 decades - 54
Dominique Strauss-Kahn4 decades - 55
Mileva Marić0 decades - 56
Margaret Hamiltonnot measured- - 57
Carl Schmitt11 decades - 58
Alfred Adler11 decades - 59
Emmy Noether7 decades - 60
Edward Said4 decades - 61
Maximilian Kolbe1 decades - 62
Claude Shannon6 decades - 63
Jean Piaget10 decades - 64
Erich Fromm9 decades - 65
Paul Erdős0 decades - 66
B. F. Skinner5 decades - 67
Paramahansa Yogananda6 decades - 68
James Comey1 decades - 69
Aurobindo Ghosh4 decades - 70
Claude Lévi-Strauss8 decades - 71
Jean Baudrillard6 decades - 72
Francis Fukuyama4 decades - 73
Abraham Maslow6 decades - 74
Howard Carter12 decades - 75
Yanis Varoufakis0 decades - 76
Emil Cioran3 decades - 77
Marshall McLuhan7 decades - 78
Julius Evola7 decades - 79
Lyudmila Putinanot measured- - 80
Roland Barthes8 decades - 81
Aziz Sancar0 decades - 82
Margaret Mead10 decades - 83
Lev Vygotsky3 decades - 84
Ramana Maharshi6 decades - 85
Ben Bernanke2 decades - 86
John Rawls5 decades - 87
Thor Heyerdahl7 decades - 88
Boris Berezovsky3 decades - 89
Marvin Minsky4 decades - 90
G.H. Hardy0 decades - 91
Steven Pinker3 decades - 92
Edith Stein10 decades - 93
Herbert Marcuse8 decades - 94
Ludwig von Mises8 decades - 95
José Ortega y Gasset12 decades - 96
Peter Singer4 decades - 97
Jennifer Doudna0 decades - 98
Bartholomew I of Constantinoplenot measured- - 99
Klaus Schwabnot measured- - 100
Alfred Wegener12 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.