From Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein, and Shakespeare to Stephen King, two data analysts have ranked the most significant people in history – do the results seem right?
BY Steven Skiena and Charles B Ward
The Guardian, Thursday 30 January 2014
People love lists, and are perhaps even more 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?
We
work in the fields of data and computer science and do not answer these
questions as 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 single consensus value.
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