← 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
Albert Einstein11 decades - 2
Stephen Hawking4 decades - 3
Marie Curie4 decades - 4
J. Robert Oppenheimer8 decades - 5
Richard Feynman4 decades - 6
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam0 decades - 7
Werner Heisenberg10 decades - 8
Carl Sagan6 decades - 9
Wernher von Braun7 decades - 10
Steve Wozniak4 decades - 11
Howard Hughes9 decades - 12
Richard Dawkins4 decades - 13
Niels Bohr10 decades - 14
Miguel Díaz-Canel0 decades - 15
Neil deGrasse Tyson1 decades - 16
Mikhail Kalashnikov4 decades - 17
Enrico Fermi10 decades - 18
Erwin Schrödinger11 decades - 19
Rosalind Franklin4 decades - 20
Edward Teller8 decades - 21
James Watsonnot measured- - 22
Sergei Korolev6 decades - 23
Alexander Fleming8 decades - 24
C. V. Raman0 decades - 25
Chen-ning Yang8 decades - 26
Andrei Sakharov5 decades - 27
Boris Nemtsov3 decades - 28
Guglielmo Marconi13 decades - 29
Fritz Haber11 decades - 30
Irène Joliot-Curie8 decades - 31
Ernest Rutherford12 decades - 32
Otto Skorzeny6 decades - 33
Roger Penrose3 decades - 34
Primo Levi11 decades - 35
Paul Dirac3 decades - 36
Max Born9 decades - 37
Linus Pauling9 decades - 38
Lev Landau6 decades - 39
Lise Meitner12 decades - 40
Zbigniew Brzezinski6 decades - 41
Jonas Salk7 decades - 42
Ferdinand Porsche9 decades - 43
Rachel Carson7 decades - 44
Francis Crick5 decades - 45
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar0 decades - 46
Vladimir Komarov7 decades - 47
Otto Hahn14 decades - 48
Tu Youyounot measured- - 49
Michio Kaku2 decades - 50
Georges Lemaître7 decades - 51
Albert Hofmannnot measured- - 52
Ernest Lawrence8 decades - 53
Wolfgang Paulinot measured-
- 54
Edwin Hubble5 decades - 55
Norman Borlaug5 decades - 56
Homi Jehangir Bhabha0 decades - 57
Yoshinori Ohsumi0 decades - 58
William Bradford Shockley7 decades - 59
Jack LaLanne0 decades - 60
Kip S. Thorne0 decades - 61
Santiago Calatrava3 decades - 62
Konrad Zuse6 decades - 63
Konrad Lorenz9 decades - 64
Tsung-Dao Lee0 decades - 65
Vera Rubin1 decades - 66
Satyendra Nath Bose0 decades - 67
Louis de Broglie10 decades - 68
Valery Legasovnot measured- - 69
John Logie Baird3 decades - 70
Shuji Nakamura0 decades - 71
Robert H. Goddard7 decades - 72
Frédéric Joliot-Curie8 decades - 73
Abdus Salam7 decades - 74
Igor Sikorsky8 decades - 75
Hans Bethe7 decades - 76
John Bardeen7 decades - 77
Peter Higgs1 decades - 78
Freeman Dyson6 decades - 79
Pyotr Kapitsa0 decades - 80
Mikhail Botvinnik7 decades - 81
Raymond Kurzweil0 decades - 82
Leo Szilard0 decades - 83
Eugene Wigner0 decades - 84
Stephen Jay Gould4 decades - 85
Thomas Kuhn5 decades - 86
Luis Walter Alvarez0 decades - 87
Murray Gell-Mann5 decades - 88
James Chadwicknot measured- - 89
Nikolai Vavilov8 decades - 90
Ahmed Zewail0 decades - 91
Kensō Soainot measured- - 92
Luc Montagnier4 decades - 93
Kailash Satyarthi0 decades - 94
Vint Cerf1 decades - 95
Kary Mullis0 decades - 96
Ernő Rubik0 decades - 97
Dorothy Hodgkin1 decades - 98
Barbara McClintock4 decades - 99
Trofim Lysenko8 decades - 100
Chien-Shiung Wu6 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.