Great People in Ancient History You Should Know
P eople love lists, and are perhaps even more than fascinated by rankings – lists organised according to some measure of value or merit. Who were the most important women in history? The best writers or most influential artists? Our least illustrious political leaders? Who's bigger: Hitler or Napoleon? Picasso or Michelangelo? Charles Dickens or Jane Austen? John, Paul, George or Ringo?
Nosotros work in the fields of information and computer scientific discipline and do not reply these questions equally historians might, through a principled assessment of a person's achievements. Instead, we aggregate millions of opinions. We rank historical figures just as Google ranks web pages, by integrating a diverse set of measurements of reputation into a unmarried consensus value.
Significance is related to fame but measures something unlike. According to our organization, forgotten U.s. President Chester A Arthur (who we rank at 499) is more historically significant than pop star Justin Bieber (ranked eight,633), even though Arthur may have a less devoted following and certainly has lower contemporary proper name recognition. Nosotros believe our computational, data-axial assay provides new means to understand and interpret the past.
Historically pregnant figures exit statistical bear witness of their presence behind, if one knows where to look for it. We utilize several data sources to fuel our ranking algorithms. Most important is Wikipedia, the web-based, collaborative, multi-lingual encyclopedia. Wikipedia is enormous, featuring well over 3m articles in its English edition lonely. But we utilize it in a manner quite different from the typical reader, by analysing the Wiki pages of more than 800,000 people to measure quantities that should stand for to historical significance. Nosotros would expect that more pregnant people should have longer Wikipedia pages than those less notable because they have greater accomplishments to report. The Wiki pages of people of higher significance should attract greater readership than those of lower significance. The aristocracy should have pages linked to by other highly significant figures, meaning they should have a high PageRank, the measure out of importance used past Google to identify of import web pages. We combine these other variables into a single number using a statistical method called gene analysis. Simply nosotros need one final correction: to fairly compare contemporary figures such as Britney Spears against, say, Aristotle, we must adjust for the fact that today'southward stars volition fade from living memory over the side by side several generations. By analysing traces left in millions of scanned books, we promise to measure only how fast this decay occurs, and correct for information technology.
We have naturally received strong reactions from readers of our book Who'southward Bigger? complaining about our computational methodology. Sure historians have complained that Wiki cannot be trusted as a source for anything. This is pretty silly. People find Wikipedia manufactures to be more often than not accurate and informative, or else they wouldn't read them. Where do you caput to read up on a new topic you lot are interested in? We think it is clear that anyone (or anything, like our algorithms) that has read all of Wikipedia would be in an excellent position to discourse about the most important people in recorded history.
More cogent is the complaint that our results are culturally biased considering we analyse only the English edition of Wikipedia. How can nosotros adequately assess the significance of Chinese poets against US presidents? We hold that any ranking of historical significance is indeed culturally dependent and so, yes, our rankings take an Anglocentric bias. But the depth of Wikipedia is then dandy that there are hundreds of articles nigh Chinese poets in the English edition.
Others highlight a few contemporary figures that they deem us to have overrated, such as Britney Spears (689) or Barack Obama (111), and utilise this anecdotal bear witness to sneer. But we besides deport validation procedures, and compare our rankings to public opinion polls, Hall of Fame voting records, sports statistics, and even the prices of paintings and autographs.
Anecdotal evidence is not as compelling equally information technology might seem. British readers have complained that our algorithms don't rank British figures loftier plenty merely as strongly as Spanish readers think we are unfair to their compatriots. But our book is designed in role to generate contend.
Our overall summit 30
1 Jesus
2 Napoleon
3 Muhammad
4 William Shakespeare
5 Abraham Lincoln
vi George Washington
7 Adolf Hitler
viii Aristotle
9 Alexander the Great
ten Thomas Jefferson
11 Henry VIII
12 Charles Darwin
thirteen Elizabeth I
14 Karl Marx
15 Julius Caesar
xvi Queen Victoria
17 Martin Luther
18 Joseph Stalin
19 Albert Einstein
20 Christopher Columbus
21 Isaac Newton
22 Charlemagne
23 Theodore Roosevelt
24 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
25 Plato
26 Louis Xiv
27 Ludwig van Beethoven
28 Ulysses Due south Grant
29 Leonardo da Vinci
30 Augustus
Peak pre-20th-century artists
Fine art has been a uniquely act for more than 40,000 years. But the names of artists went unrecorded for most of this flow. The identities of several prominent Greek artists, most notably Phidias, survive through contemporary written accounts and Roman copies of their work. But the notion of artists with singled-out identities and so faded, not to be revived until the late heart ages. The great painters of the Renaissance dominate our rankings of the most significant pre-20th century artists.
1 Leonardo da Vinci (overall ranking 29)
2 Michelangelo (86)
3 Raphael (140)
4 Rembrandt (189)
5 Titian (319)
6 Francisco Goya (366)
7 El Greco (465)
8 Albrecht Dürer (503)
9 Hans Holbein the Younger (555)
10 Johannes Vermeer (567)
11 Jacques-Louis David (607)
12 Giotto (610)
13 Diego Velázquez (693)
fourteen Gustave Courbet (965)
15 Hieronymus Bosch (983)
Summit modern-era artists
The Impressionist painters and their successors are at the peak of our table of the nearly pregnant modern artists. Later movements such as surrealism (Salvador Dalí, 1,021) and abstruse expressionism (Jackson Pollock, i,013) are represented, only by relatively few artists.
1 Vincent van Gogh (73)
2 Pablo Picasso (171)
3 Claude Monet (178)
four Henri Matisse (376)
five Paul Cézanne (389)
vi Edgar Degas (422)
vii Andy Warhol (485)
8 Paul Gauguin (540)
9 Pierre-Auguste Renoir (549)
x Auguste Rodin (574)
xi Wassily Kandinsky (618)
12 Edouard Manet (640)
13 Camille Pissarro (815)
14 Diego Rivera (915)
15 Edvard Munch (944)
16 James McNeill Whistler (i,002)
17 Jackson Pollock (ane,013)
18 Salvador Dalí (ane,021)
19 Piet Mondrian (ane,051)
20 Georgia O'Keeffe (1,178)
Elevation 50 literary figures
Ranking the world'due south greatest literary figures is a parlour game – just like the ranking of presidents or prime ministers. It exposes the biases inherent in everyone's world-view. But our ranking, it turns out, agrees with others: our height 50 contains 39 members of Daniel Burt's The Literary 100, including his 11 highest-ranked figures. With our Anglocentric source bias, nosotros feature a larger number of British and US writers (but Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson are the but women to make it into the top fifty).
ane William Shakespeare (four)
2 Charles Dickens (33)
3 Mark Twain (53)
4 Edgar Allan Poe (54)
five Voltaire (64)
six Oscar Wilde (77)
7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (88)
8 Dante Alighieri (96)
9 Lewis Carroll (118)
10 Henry David Thoreau (131)
11 Jane Austen (139)
12 Samuel Johnson (141)
13 Homer (152)
14 Lord Byron (158)
15 Walt Whitman (160)
16 John Milton (165)
17 Geoffrey Chaucer (173)
18 Virgil (177)
nineteen William Wordsworth (182)
xx Stephen Rex (191)
21 Emily Dickinson (194)
22 Leo Tolstoy (196)
23 Victor Hugo (208)
24 George Bernard Shaw (213)
25 Nathaniel Hawthorne (227)
26 Fyodor Dostoyevsky (244)
27 Miguel de Cervantes (246)
28 Ernest Hemingway (248)
29 HG Wells (249)
30 Herman Melville (251)
31 Rudyard Kipling (259)
32 Sophocles (274)
33 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (280)
34 John Keats (305)
35 Robert Burns (317)
36 Petrarch (326)
37 Percy Bysshe Shelley (329)
38 George Orwell (342)
39 Christopher Marlowe (374)
twoscore Thomas Hardy (378)
41 Aeschylus (386)
42 Jonathan Swift (391)
43 Rabindranath Tagore (397)
44 Henrik Ibsen (403)
45 James Joyce (406)
46 Henry James (408)
47 Aristophanes (418)
48 Alexander Pushkin (420)
49 Ben Jonson (421)
50 TS Eliot (436)
Nosotros generally score pop writers such as Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Marking Twain higher than we call back the literary establishment would. Nosotros expect them to be surprised by our rank for horror novelist Stephen King. No other contemporary author came shut to a spot in our Literary 50. Just we consider King to exist the Dickens [33] of our time, characterised past immense popularity, mind-extraordinary productivity, and even the serial novel genre.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/30/whos-most-significant-historical-figure
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