← 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 Italian books during the 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Giotto5.4 - 2
Dante Alighieri5.0 - 3
Caravaggio3.8 - 4
Leonardo da Vinci3.8 - 5
Antonio da Correggio3.7 - 6
Benedetto Croce3.3 - 7
Donato Bramante2.9 - 8
Donatello2.8 - 9
Giuseppe Mazzini2.2 - 10
Alessandro Manzoni2.2 - 11
Ugo Foscolo2.1 - 12
Pietro Perugino2.0 - 13
Tintoretto1.9 - 14
Francis of Assisi1.8 - 15
Giacomo Leopardi1.8 - 16
Benito Mussolini1.8 - 17
Torquato Tasso1.7 - 18
Masaccio1.7 - 19
Giordano Bruno1.6 - 20
Lorenzo de' Medici1.6 - 21
Galileo Galilei1.6 - 22
Charles Borromeo1.6 - 23
Giosuè Carducci1.5 - 24
Marco Polo1.4 - 25
Giuseppe Verdi1.4
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 20th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Stephen Hawking4 decades - 2
Richard Dawkins4 decades - 3
Rosalind Franklin4 decades - 4
Alexander Fleming8 decades - 5
Roger Penrose3 decades - 6
Paul Dirac3 decades - 7
Max Born9 decades - 8
Francis Crick5 decades - 9
William Bradford Shockley7 decades - 10
John Logie Baird3 decades - 11
Peter Higgs1 decades - 12
Freeman Dyson6 decades - 13
James Chadwicknot measured- - 14
Dorothy Hodgkin1 decades - 15
Arthur Eddington9 decades - 16
Klaus Fuchsnot measured- - 17
Ronald Fisher6 decades - 18
Charles K. Kao0 decades - 19
Andre Geim0 decades - 20
Jocelyn Bell Burnell0 decades - 21
Frederick Sanger0 decades - 22
Millvina Deannot measured- - 23
Lawrence Bragg0 decades - 24
Fred Hoyle7 decades - 25
Patrick Blackett0 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.