Who is the Most Famous Person of all Time?
Who is the most famous person to ever exist? Depending on who you ask, you will receive a different answer almost every time. Some believe it’s Michael Jackson due to the sheer influence he had over the world in the 80s and 90s. As well-known as he may be, however, Michael hasn’t made a long-lasting global impact in the way other figures have. Thus, an older and more impactful figure like Leonardo Da Vinci may be a more accurate guess. That being said, his accomplishments are not impacting the average person in a way that would boost his overall relevance.
Although there is no concrete way to determine who the most famous person ever was, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a list with their best guesses. The Pantheon is an MIT-developed site that tracks internet traffic to biographies and language data to compile a ranking of the most popular figures in history. According to their data, the most popular person in history is the Prophet Muhammed. This makes sense logically, as Islam is one of the world’s most practiced religions and has influence around the globe. Just below Muhammed are Isaac Newton in 2nd and Ghanghis Khan in 3rd. Surprisingly, Jesus Christ only came in 4th, despite also being a major religious figure like Muhammed. This result is most likely due to Jesus having slightly less web presence in languages other than English, a data point the website used for their findings.
What's also fascinating about this website is that the settings can be tweaked to virtually any category a user would like to explore. Whether someone wants to find the most famous soccer players or popular people born in London, The Pantheon’s dataset allows for it all. For example, Pantheon’s settings allowed me to discover that the most popular Japanese comic artist who was born in Kumamoto between the years 1970 and 1980 is Eiichiro Oda. The link to this site can be found below.
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