We now have access to digital versions of millions of books, and we can search them to know who and what is mentioned, and where, and how much. The term “culturonomics” sounds both faddish and ugly, but it refers to a promising new field, and we are going to be able to learn a lot from it. In 2011, Jean-Baptiste Michel and multiple co-authors published an article in Science, helpfully if not colorfully titled “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” which announced that more than five million books had been digitized, thus giving us a new tool by which to identify cultural trends and to quantify changes over time. You can see when certain words become popular, how grammar evolves, when scientific developments begin to be discussed, which illnesses receive attention, which philosophers are mentioned and when and how much, and far more. From millions of digitized books, we should be able to learn a great deal about culture and social norms and how they change. In important ways, we might also be able to rank people, places, and things.

Steven Skiena and Charles Ward are keenly interested in, even delighted by, rankings. In particular, they are interested in ranking people along one dimension: significance. It would certainly be interesting to develop a kind of warp for significance. How much did Einstein, Darwin, Descartes, Freud, Michelangelo, Mozart, Picasso, and Bob Dylan contribute to the world, compared with the average human being? That seems to be an interesting question, but it raises obvious conceptual and empirical challenges. We lack standards and tools to measure social contributions, certainly across time and across diverse fields and enterprises.

Skiena and Ward do not argue against this conclusion. Undaunted, they nonetheless offer a significance ranking. Here is their list of the twenty most significant people of all time:

1. Jesus

2. Napoleon

3. Mohammed

4. William Shakespeare

5. Abraham Lincoln

6. George Washington

7. Adolf Hitler

8. Aristotle

9. Alexander the Great

10. Thomas Jefferson

11. Henry VIII

12. Charles Darwin

13. Elizabeth I

14. Karl Marx

15. Julius Caesar

16. Queen Victoria

17. Martin Luther

18. Joseph Stalin

19. Albert Einstein

20. Christopher Columbus

Skiena and Ward compile this list by reference to what they see as five objective indicators, every one involving the English-language version of Wikipedia. (That is a big problem, and we will get to it in due course.) Their first two indicators draw on Google’s famous algorithm, called Page-Rank. Skiena and Ward contend that the pages of significant people end up getting a lot of links. If numerous Wikipedia pages end up linking to Abraham Lincoln, we have a clue that Lincoln was a major figure. With this point in mind, Skiena and Ward ask: what is the probability that a random Wikipedia page will link to a particular person’s page? The higher the probability, the more significant that person’s page.

Skiena and Ward are aware that you might come to Jesus (so to speak) not through surfing pages that involve people, but because Jesus’ page gets a lot of links from pages that involve institutions, animals, and inanimate objects. By the Page-Rank method, for example, Carl Linnaeus, the great scientist of classification, ends up third on their all-time list, which seems pretty absurd. Owing to this problem, they add a second measure, which limits the PageRank analysis to links among people. With this measure, Carl Linnaeus’s ranking plummets. (Jesus does great.)

For their third measure, Skiena and Ward focus on the number of “hits” that Wikipedia pages receive. They note that this measure can produce dramatically different rankings from those that emerge from PageRank. Many entertainers, such as Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift, get a phenomenal number of hits, even though they do not do especially well on PageRank. Their fourth measure involves the length of Wikipedia articles. In their view, more significant people will tend to end up with longer articles, reflecting the magnitude of their contribution. Fifth, and finally, Skiena and Ward explore the sheer number of times that a page is edited. They think that if a lot of people are contributing to a page, there is a great deal of interest in it, and that interest tells us something about significance.

Skiena and Ward are aware that their different indicators might measure different things. They find that by their two PageRank measures, famous presidents, scientists, and philosophers tend to do quite well, whereas famous movie stars do better in terms of hits, length of articles, and number of edits. They say that their first two measures capture “gravitas,” while the latter three reflect “celebrity.” For their judgment of “fame,” they add the two measures together.

Jesus is probably a fictional character. Not that it matters too much in such an analysis.

Even if he isn't fictional, probably 99+% of characteristics ascribed to him are either completely made up or completely lifted from previous figures, real or imaginary. In which case everything that makes him significant is fiction.

'Significant' is too general to define for a list like this.

I think through any metric or measure


Jesus and Mohammed would be the most influential people in history.

Religion is extremely significant, but at the end of the day, a lot of it still based on belief and stories, not actual historical fact. Columbus, someone else would have found America if he didn't.

But you can say the same about everything. If Einstein hadn't come up with his ideas, someone else would have....