Posted on 12/14/2013 8:07:17 AM PST by rwa265
He’s a man with a ton of titles — Prince of Peace, Son of God, Shepherd of Souls — but now Jesus has one more: the biggest name in human history. Ever. So say the authors of a startling new book, “Who’s Bigger: Where Historical Figures Really Rank,” which tries to settle, once and for all, the question of who’s who. It’s a work of “culturometrics,” a fancy term to describe quantitative data analysis applied to individuals in society the same way Sabermetrics tracks performance in baseball, pundits aggregate polls in elections, and algorithms rule computer search engines. “Bigger” is a complex collection of lists and rankings, but none is more provocative than its Top 100: Jesus is No. 1, Adolf Hitler is No. 7, everyone is overwhelmingly white and 97 are male.
But keep your blood pressure in check. “Bigger does not mean better,” said co-author Steven Skiena, a computer science professor at Stony Brook University where he heads the Data Science Laboratory.
To research “Bigger,” Skiena and Charles Ward, an engineer on the ranking team at Google, created a complex amalgam of measures. To establish their “significance” ranking, they assessed more than 800,000 names, calculated scores of celebrity and achievement or gravitas and then factored in how long, and how long ago, someone lived.
Hence the Top 10 names need no introduction:
1. Jesus
2. Napoleon Bonaparte
3. Muhammad
4. William Shakespeare
5. Abraham Lincoln
6. George Washington
7. Adolf Hitler
8. Aristotle
9. Alexander the Great
10. Thomas Jefferson
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
I would pick St. Paul for number 2.
If bigger is based on weight, wouldn’t Elvis be #1?
Elvis by at least 80 lbs.
Nobody topples Jesus. Nobody had a larger impact on human history.
Some of these are certainly questionable. Is Aristotle more significant than Plato? Is Shakespeare more significant than Confucius or Shih Huang Ti? Is Napoleon more significant than Bismarck?
I would agree that Jesus has had the greatest impact for the last 2000 years.
However, the article didn’t mention Gutenberg. Wikipedia says Gutenberg’s invention “is widely regarded as the most important event of the modern period.” And a program on the History Channel ranks him as the #1 historical figure (leaving out religious figures).
For better or worse, the three people who had the greatest influence on the 20th Century were: Einstein, Freud, and Marx.
If bigger is based on weight, wouldn’t Elvis be #1?...
Budda
:)
I don’t know, I’m all shook up!
My blood pressure's just fine, thanks. Why wouldn't it be?
Did you notice what all three had in common?
(hint: ethnicity) :)
I’ve been testing Hitler vs. Elvis via Google News Alerts for the last 6 weeks or so. Hitler wins by far, but sometimes Elvis tops him. I think a data driven approach like this is better than subjective approaches.
Elvis Presley is at #69. He outranks William the Conqueror (70), John F. Kennedy (71), Augustine of Hippo (72), Nicolaus Copernicus (74), Robert E. Lee (76), Marcus Cicero (79), Thomas Aquinas (90), John Calvin (99) and John Locke (100).
Fred Waring, Paul Whiteman, Kate Smith and Jenny Lind, whose contributions to popular music far outranked those of Elvis Presley didn’t even make the list.
1 Buddha
2 Elvis
Where is Leonardo da Vinci?
At #29--between Ulysses Grant (28) and Caesar Augustus (30).
If there was a link to the complete list, I didn’t see it.
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