Most Famous People in History: MIT Pantheon's Top 10 Explained

In this article · 7 sections

1. The top ten at a glance
2. How Pantheon measured fame
3. The philosophers: Aristotle, Plato and Socrates
4. Faith and empire: Jesus, Alexander and Caesar
5. The artist and the teacher: Leonardo and Confucius
6. Legends at the edge of history: Homer and Pythagoras
7. What the ranking does and does not tell us

If you measure fame by how many of the world's languages have written about a person, the most famous human being of the past six thousand years is Aristotle. That was the verdict of Pantheon, a data project from the MIT Media Lab presented in 2014. Its top ten was dominated by ancient Greece: Aristotle, Plato, Jesus Christ, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, Confucius, Julius Caesar, Homer and Pythagoras.

The list is a fascinating snapshot, but it is not a ranking of who mattered most. It is a ranking of who is most visible in Wikipedia, which is a different and more modest claim. Below you will find how the project worked, a short and fact-checked portrait of each of the ten, and what the result does and does not tell us about history.

The top ten at a glance

1. Aristotle (384–322 BC), Greek philosopher and scientist
2. Plato (c. 428/427–348/347 BC), Greek philosopher
3. Jesus Christ (c. 4 BC – c. AD 30/33), central figure of Christianity
4. Socrates (c. 470–399 BC), Greek philosopher
5. Alexander the Great (356–323 BC), king of Macedon
6. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Italian painter, engineer and scientist
7. Confucius (551–479 BC), Chinese teacher and thinker
8. Julius Caesar (100–44 BC), Roman general and statesman
9. Homer (probably 8th century BC), the poet credited with the Iliad and the Odyssey
10. Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BC), Greek philosopher and mathematician

Eight of the ten lived before the birth of Christ, seven were Greek or Macedonian, and none were women. Those patterns are worth keeping in mind as you read on.

How Pantheon measured fame

Pantheon was built by the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab, led by the physicist César Hidalgo. The team began with people whose biographies existed in at least 25 language editions of Wikipedia, which gave them roughly 11,000 names. They then sorted those people by birthplace, profession and era, and removed short-lived internet celebrities so that the list favoured lasting presence.

The idea is simple: if volunteers writing in Swahili, Korean, Finnish and Portuguese have all felt that a person deserves an article, that person has crossed cultural borders. Later versions of Pantheon refined the method into a Historical Popularity Index, which also weighs page views, how evenly those views are spread across languages, how long ago the person lived, and views from outside the English Wikipedia. The current dataset uses a lower threshold of 15 languages and is far larger.

Hidalgo himself played down the headline ranking. Speaking to Fast Company in 2014, he said that "the rankings are not meaningful or significant", and argued that the interesting part was the broader pattern: which countries and professions have produced globally remembered people, and when.

The philosophers: Aristotle, Plato and Socrates

Aristotle

Aristotle was born in 384 BC at Stagira in northern Greece. His father Nicomachus served as physician to King Amyntas III of Macedon, the grandfather of Alexander. At about seventeen he went to Athens and studied at Plato's Academy for some twenty years, until Plato's death in 347 BC.

Around 343 BC King Philip II invited him to Macedon to teach his thirteen-year-old son Alexander; the lessons probably lasted two or three years. Back in Athens he founded his own school, the Lyceum, in 335 BC. His surviving works range across logic, biology, physics, ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetry, and for nearly two thousand years they shaped how Europe and the Islamic world organised knowledge. He died in 322 BC at Chalcis.

Plato

Plato, born in Athens around 428 BC, was Socrates' most famous pupil and Aristotle's teacher. Around 387 BC he founded the Academy, a school that met in a grove outside the city walls and is often described as the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.

He wrote mostly in dialogues, conversations in which Socrates usually leads the questioning. Works such as the Republic, the Symposium and the Apology explore justice, love, knowledge and the ideal state.

Socrates

Socrates wrote nothing at all. Everything we know about him comes from others, chiefly Plato, the historian Xenophon and the comic playwright Aristophanes, who mocked him on stage. That makes him one of history's great puzzles: we see him only through the eyes of admirers and critics.

His method of probing a claim with patient questions until its weaknesses appear still carries his name, the Socratic method, and is used in law schools and classrooms worldwide. In 399 BC an Athenian jury convicted him of impiety and corrupting the young, and he was put to death by drinking hemlock. The painting shown here is a detail from Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates (1787), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Faith and empire: Jesus, Alexander and Caesar

Jesus Christ

Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish preacher from Galilee who lived roughly from 4 BC to AD 30 or 33 and was crucified in Jerusalem under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. Most historians, whatever their beliefs, accept that he existed; the details of his life come mainly from the Gospels of the New Testament.

Christians regard him as the Messiah and, in most traditions, the Son of God. With more than two billion followers, Christianity is the world's largest religion, which explains why his biography appears in almost every language edition of Wikipedia. The image here is in the style of a Byzantine icon, the form of religious art still used in Greek Orthodox churches.

Alexander the Great

Alexander was born in Pella, the Macedonian capital, in July 356 BC, and became king at twenty after his father Philip II was assassinated in 336 BC. In barely a dozen years he defeated the Persian Empire, winning decisive battles at Issus (333 BC) and Gaugamela (331 BC), and led his army as far as the Indus valley.

He died in Babylon on 10 or 11 June 323 BC, aged 32. The cause is still debated: fever, malaria, typhoid and poisoning have all been proposed, and no single explanation is proven. His conquests spread Greek language and culture from Egypt to Afghanistan, opening the Hellenistic age. The picture is a detail from the Alexander Mosaic found in Pompeii's House of the Faun, made around 100 BC.

Julius Caesar

Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) rose through Roman politics in an informal alliance with Pompey and Crassus, often called the First Triumvirate, formed around 60 BC. His campaigns in Gaul between 58 and 50 BC pushed Roman rule to the Rhine and the English Channel; he bridged the Rhine and led the first Roman expeditions to Britain in 55 and 54 BC.

In 49 BC he crossed the Rubicon with his army, starting a civil war that made him dictator. A group of senators stabbed him to death on the Ides of March, 15 March 44 BC. His own accounts of his wars remain classics of Latin prose, and his name lives on in the titles Kaiser and Tsar.

The artist and the teacher: Leonardo and Confucius

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 near the Tuscan town of Vinci and died at Amboise in France in 1519. He trained as a painter in Florence, but his notebooks show a restless mind that studied anatomy, flight, water, optics and machines with equal passion.

Only around twenty paintings are firmly attributed to him, yet they include the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks. His Leda and the Swan is lost and survives only through copies by other artists. For many people he is the model of the "Renaissance man", curious about everything.

Confucius

Confucius is the Latin form of Kong Fuzi, "Master Kong". His personal name was Kong Qiu, and he lived from 551 to 479 BC in the small state of Lu, in today's Shandong province. He worked as a minor official and teacher, and spent years travelling in search of a ruler who would put his ideas into practice.

His sayings were collected by his followers in the Analects. They stress respect within the family, sincerity, learning and the duty of rulers to govern by moral example. Under the Han dynasty his teaching became the official state philosophy, and for some two thousand years it shaped education and government examinations in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam.

Legends at the edge of history: Homer and Pythagoras

Homer

Homer is the name the Greeks gave to the poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, but almost nothing about him is certain. The historian Herodotus placed him about four hundred years before his own time, which points to the 9th or 8th century BC. Most modern scholars think the poems took their present shape in the late 8th or early 7th century BC.

Both epics grew out of a long tradition of oral storytelling, and many scholars now believe the two poems were composed by different poets. Precise dates for their composition, sometimes printed in popular lists, are guesses rather than facts. Whoever "Homer" was, the poems became the foundation of Greek education and of European literature.

Pythagoras

Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos around 570 BC and moved around 530 BC to Croton, a Greek city in southern Italy, where he founded a community that combined philosophy, mathematics and a strict religious way of life. He wrote nothing that survives, and much of his biography was written centuries later and mixes fact with legend.

The theorem that bears his name was known long before him: Babylonian tablets such as Plimpton 322 and the Indian Baudhayana Sulbasutra show the relationship between the sides of a right triangle. Tradition also says he was the first to call himself a "philosopher", a lover of wisdom; that story is old but cannot be verified.

What the ranking does and does not tell us

Pantheon's top ten is best read as a mirror of how knowledge is recorded today. Ancient figures have had more time to enter textbooks, translations and school curricula, so they appear in more languages. Greek and Roman antiquity is taught across Europe, the Americas and beyond, which gives its heroes a head start in a ranking built on language editions.

The data also carries the biases of its source. Wikipedia's volunteer editors are not a random sample of humanity, and history itself recorded the lives of men, rulers and the literate far more often than anyone else. That is why the list has no women and only one figure, Confucius, from outside the Mediterranean world.

Used with that in mind, Pantheon is still a useful tool: its interactive site lets you compare countries, eras and professions. It is also a reminder that fame is not fixed, but something each generation helps to write.

Sources: Fast Company (2014): MIT Media Lab maps history's biggest celebrities; Pantheon: methods and Historical Popularity Index; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Aristotle; Wikipedia: Alexander the Great; Wikipedia: Homer; Wikipedia: Pythagoras.

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