Hisotircal Figures You Need to Know
Who's bigger: Washington or Lincoln? Hitler or Napoleon? Charles Dickens or Jane Austen? That depends on how you await at information technology.
When we set out to rank the significance of historical figures, we decided to not approach the project the way historians might, through a principled assessment of their individual achievements. Instead, nosotros evaluated each person by aggregating millions of traces of opinions into a computational data-centric assay. Nosotros ranked historical figures just as Google ranks web pages, by integrating a diverse set of measurements virtually their reputation into a single consensus value.
Significance is related to fame but measures something unlike. Forgotten U.S. President Chester A. Arthur (who we rank as the 499thursday most meaning person in history) is more historically significant than young pop singer Justin Bieber (currently ranked 8633), even though he may have a less devoted following and lower contemporary name recognition. Historically significant figures leave statistical bear witness of their presence backside, if i knows where to expect for it, and we used several data sources to fuel our ranking algorithms, including Wikipedia, scanned books and Google n-grams.
To adequately compare contemporary figures like Britney Spears against the aboriginal Greek philosopher Aristotle, we adjusted for the fact that today'southward stars will fade from living retentivity over the side by side several generations. Intuitively it is clear that Britney Spears' mindshare will decline substantially over the next 100 years, as people who grew up hearing her are replaced past new generations. Only Aristotle's reputation will be much more stable because this transition occurred long ago. The reputation he has at present is presumably destined to endure. Past analyzing traces left in millions of scanned books, we can mensurate but how fast this decay occurs, and correct for it.
We don't expect you lot will agree with everyone chosen for the top 100, or exactly where they are placed. But nosotros trust you will concord that virtually selections are reasonable: a quarter of them are philosophers or major religious figures, plus 8 scientists/inventors, xiii giants in literature and music, and three of the greatest artists of all fourth dimension. We take validated our results past comparing them against several standards: published rankings by historians, public polls, even in predicting the prices of autographs, paintings, and baseball cards. Since we analyzed the English language Wikipedia, we admittedly measured the interests and judgments of primarily the Western, English language-speaking customs. Our algorithms also don't include many women at the very summit: Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) [at number 13] is the top ranked woman in history co-ordinate to our assay. This is at least partially due to women beingness underrepresented in Wikipedia.
Each year since 1927, TIME Magazine has selected an official Person of the Yr, recognizing an individual who "has done the well-nigh to influence the events of the twelvemonth." Our rankings provide a mode to run into how well these selections accept stood up over fourth dimension. Adolf Hitler [7] proves to be the virtually significant Person of the Year ever. Albert Einstein [xix] was the most significant modern individual never selected for the annual award, though TIME did name him Person of the Century in 1999. Elvis Presley [69] is the highest ranked figure that has been completely dissed: no author or artist has e'er so been honored.
The least significant Person of the Year proves to be Harlow Curtice [224326], the president of Full general Motors for five years during the 1950s who increased capital spending in a fourth dimension of recession, which helped spur a recovery of the American economic system. Other obscure selections include Hugh Samuel "Atomic number 26 Pants" Johnson [32927], who Franklin Roosevelt appointed to head the low-era National Recovery Assistants, and fired less than a year later. John Sirica [47053] was the District Court Judge who ordered President Nixon to plow over tape recordings in the Watergate Scandal. David Ho [66267] is credited with developing the combination therapy that provided the first effective treatment for AIDS. His contributions to human health arguably deserve a better significance rank than our algorithms gave him here.
The 100 Well-nigh Significant Figures in History
ane Jesus
2 Napoleon
3 Muhammad
4 William Shakespeare
five Abraham Lincoln
6 George Washington
7 Adolf Hitler
8 Aristotle
ix Alexander the Great
ten Thomas Jefferson
11 Henry VIII of England
12 Charles Darwin
13 Elizabeth I of England
14 Karl Marx
15 Julius Caesar
16 Queen Victoria
17 Martin Luther
xviii Joseph Stalin
19 Albert Einstein
twenty Christopher Columbus
21 Isaac Newton
22 Charlemagne
23 Theodore Roosevelt
24 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
25 Plato
26 Louis 14 of France
27 Ludwig van Beethoven
28 Ulysses S. Grant
29 Leonardo da Vinci
30 Augustus
31 Carl Linnaeus
32 Ronald Reagan
33 Charles Dickens
34 Paul the Apostle
35 Benjamin Franklin
36 George W. Bush
37 Winston Churchill
38 Genghis Khan
39 Charles I of England
40 Thomas Edison
41 James I of England
42 Friedrich Nietzsche
43 Franklin D. Roosevelt
44 Sigmund Freud
45 Alexander Hamilton
46 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
47 Woodrow Wilson
48 Johann Sebastian Bach
49 Galileo Galilei
50 Oliver Cromwell
51 James Madison
52 Gautama Buddha
53 Marker Twain
54 Edgar Allan Poe
55 Joseph Smith, Jr.
56 Adam Smith
57 David, King of Israel
58 George III of the Great britain
59 Immanuel Kant
sixty James Melt
61 John Adams
62 Richard Wagner
63 Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
64 Voltaire
65 Saint Peter
66 Andrew Jackson
67 Constantine the Great
68 Socrates
69 Elvis Presley
70 William the Conqueror
71 John F. Kennedy
72 Augustine of Hippo
73 Vincent van Gogh
74 Nicolaus Copernicus
75 Vladimir Lenin
76 Robert E. Lee
77 Oscar Wilde
78 Charles Ii of England
79 Cicero
80 Jean-Jacques Rousseau
81 Francis Bacon
82 Richard Nixon
83 Louis Sixteen of France
84 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
85 King Arthur
86 Michelangelo
87 Philip Ii of Spain
88 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
89 Ali, founder of Sufism
90 Thomas Aquinas
91 Pope John Paul Ii
92 René Descartes
93 Nikola Tesla
94 Harry S. Truman
95 Joan of Arc
96 Dante Alighieri
97 Otto von Bismarck
98 Grover Cleveland
99 John Calvin
100 John Locke
Steven Skiena and Charles B. Ward are the authors of Who'south Bigger? Where Historical Figures Really Rank, Cambridge University Press, 2013. The views expressed are solely their ain.
Hisotircal Figures You Need to Know
Source: https://ideas.time.com/2013/12/10/whos-biggest-the-100-most-significant-figures-in-history/
0 Response to "Hisotircal Figures You Need to Know"
Post a Comment