← 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 - 26
Pocahontas1.1
- 27
John Smith1.0 - 28
Adam Smith1.0 - 29
John Adams1.0 - 30
Sophocles1.0 - 31
Henry James0.99 - 32
Galen0.97 - 33
Walter Scott0.95 - 34
Livy0.95 - 35
Bede0.94 - 36
John the Baptist0.93 - 37
Solon0.93 - 38
Prince George, Duke of Cumberland0.90 - 39
Pericles0.89 - 40
John Henry0.87 - 41
Julius Caesar0.86 - 42
Winston Churchill0.86 - 43
Hadrian0.83 - 44
Andrew Jackson0.83 - 45
Thucydides0.83 - 46
Henry Ford0.81 - 47
Aristophanes0.79 - 48Ababa0.78
- 49
Origen0.76 - 50
George Eliot0.75 - 51
Demosthenes0.75 - 52
John F. Kennedy0.75 - 53
Brigham Young0.75 - 54
Xenophon0.73 - 55
William Penn0.71 - 56
Alexander Hamilton0.71 - 57
Richard II0.69 - 58
John Marshall0.67 - 59
Henry Clay0.67 - 60
Jefferson Davis0.67 - 61
James I, Count of Urgell0.67 - 62
Osceola0.67 - 63
Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor0.66 - 64
Aeschylus0.66 - 65
Trajan0.66 - 66
Lucretius0.65 - 67
Walt Whitman0.65 - 68
Pindar0.64 - 69
James II, Count of Urgell0.63 - 70
Alexander the Great0.63 - 71
Hippocrates0.62 - 72
Thomas Aquinas0.62 - 73
John Wesley0.62 - 74
Matthew Arnold0.62 - 75
Edward VII0.61 - 76
Charles Dickens0.61 - 77
Pythagoras0.60 - 78
Ben Jonson0.60 - 79
Strabo0.60 - 80
Black Hawk0.60 - 81
Mahatma Gandhi0.59 - 82
James Madison0.58 - 83
Hosea0.58 - 84
John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford0.58 - 85
Ronald Reagan0.57 - 86
Herbert Hoover0.57 - 87
Tertullian0.57 - 88
John Hancock0.57 - 89
Ahab0.56 - 90
William Morris0.55 - 91
J. P. Morgan0.55 - 92
Joseph Smith0.54 - 93
Plautus0.53 - 94
John Day0.53 - 95
Herbert Spencer0.52 - 96
Sulla0.52 - 97
Plotinus0.52 - 98
John Dewey0.51
- 99
Jane Austen0.51 - 100
Sam Houston0.51
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 20th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Albert Camus8 decades - 2
Jean-Paul Sartre9 decades - 3
Simone de Beauvoir8 decades - 4
Michel Foucault8 decades - 5
Simone Weil9 decades - 6
Jacques Derrida6 decades - 7
Gilles Deleuze7 decades - 8
Pierre Bourdieu7 decades - 9
Dominique Strauss-Kahn4 decades - 10
Claude Lévi-Strauss8 decades - 11
Jean Baudrillard6 decades - 12
Roland Barthes8 decades - 13
Louis Althusser6 decades - 14
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin8 decades - 15
Alexander Grothendieck0 decades - 16
Benoit Mandelbrot4 decades - 17
Edgar Morinnot measured- - 18
Nikolai Berdyaev12 decades - 19
Julia Kristeva6 decades - 20
Emmanuel Levinas7 decades - 21
Maurice Merleau-Ponty8 decades - 22
Jean Monnet13 decades - 23
Yann Le Cunnot measured- - 24
Jacques Delors7 decades - 25
Philippe Aghionnot measured-
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.