← 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 Hebrew books during the 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Rav Ashi16 - 2
Ahad Ha'am12 - 3
Haggai12 - 4
Sabbatai Zevi8.2 - 5Saadia Gaon8.1
- 6
Johanan ben Zakai5.5 - 7
Josephus5.5 - 8
Habakkuk5.3 - 9
Hai Gaon4.8 - 10Simeon ben Gamliel II4.8
- 11
Menachem Begin4.4 - 12Nathan the Babylonian3.8
- 13
Shimon Peres3.6 - 14
Paul the Apostle3.3 - 15Samuel ibn Naghrillah3.2
- 16
Moshe Dayan3.2 - 17Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg3.1
- 18
Hillel the Elder3.1 - 19Simeon ben Zoma2.8
- 20
Judas Maccabeus2.7 - 21
Yitzhak Rabin2.7 - 22
Golda Meir2.6 - 23Yanai2.5
- 24
Moshe Sharett2.2 - 25
Isaac Abrabanel2.1
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.