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1000 Most Famous People In History (MIT’s Pantheon)
Directions
Name the 1000 Most Famous People in History According to MIT’s Pantheon Project. Occupation and year of birth shown. HPI in the answer stats refers to the index which ranks the people.
Quiz Takers 
really good
An Italian action movie actor higher than an American president and war hero :’) This list keeps cracking me up.
maybe because outside of america no one knows who he is
Bro why do you only give us 7.5 minutes
the site has a premium membership which gives you double time and double time bonuses on most quizzes, it’s my way to run the site without ads 🙂
I’m not quite sure how Janis Joplin ranks ahead of John Lennon, with Mick Jagger not even making the cut. Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, and Babe Ruth didn’t make the top 1,000 – but a soccer player who was born in the 1920s made it.
Maybe people search for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones instead of the musicians. Brady and Ruth are not known outside USA.
I was thinking the same, most of the musicians/singers who make the list seem to be either solo artists or had bands named after them, with a few notable exceptions. Similar with sports, football is genuinely universal so not surprising it is the only sport represented. I remember Lance Armstrong used to make the cut in an earlier iteration but that’s about it.
lol americans
literally nobody outside of north america has a clue of who Babe Ruth is. Tom Brady also.
FYI I’ve updated this today with a newer more current run from MIT Pantheon. Some new faces!
I don’t get the critieria for this quiz. Famous means well known, not necessarily important or historically significant. Therer are a lot of people on this list that most people have no idea who they are. This wouldn’t bother me if the quiz was most important people in history. But since it’s most famous and Stallone is on the list, then why not Madonna or Beyonce, Depp or DiCaprio. Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, but nor Bill Clinton. Biden, Trump and both Bushs, but not Obama. Makes no sense.
You’d have to go to the MIT Pantheon website to see the criteria.
I see they’ve updated the list. Bill Clinton made it this time. Still don’t get how these MIT Pantheon people determine who’s on the list though. In what universe is Martin Van Buren more famous than Reagan, JFK and George Washington? Love the quiz though.
Where is Obama and Bin Laden?
A politician born in 1962????
Yes, hilarious to find him here
By my reckoning the third most famous of their country of all time after a couple of painters. Hahaha
another update with newer updated data today.
how is david attenborough not in here disgraceful
George Harrison is missing OK, but in the history of mankind I think people like Mary Wollstonecraft, or Jonas Salk are little bit more important than a 3rd Beatle.
Also they dropped half of the Beatles and left only Lennon and McCartney. I don’t recall George and Ringo having gotten less famous in the last decade or whatever it’s been, but who knows. If anything George’s legacy has improved over time.
Bizarre update. Almost no English language poets. Not even Chaucer. But still tons of French poets and literary people generally, esp Russians, French, etc. How would any of all the rest survive but not Yeats, Chaucer, Eliot, Wordsworth, Milton? Yes, Milton didn’t even make it. Shakespeare and just him. He wrote all English language poetry all by himself.
Maybe reset the scores, it seems that a lot have changed. Less Nazi’s and finally a cosmonaut 🙂 But also a terrible US president 🙁 haha
updated with current rankings.
Odd that Biblical fictional figures are treated as real people but Heracles isn’t. Heracles is every bit as historical as Moses.
i think this one always required numerals – maybe you are thinking of the ‘All’ quiz with 10K+ answers? adding those alternatives.
Oh, maybe that was it. Thanks.
should be good now.
Armstrong but no Gagarin?
Okay, I love this quiz and have played tons of times, and this isn’t exactly on it necessarily, but I’m starting to doubt MIT’s objectivity now that I realize Calvin (170) and Hobbes (165) are 5 people apart.
Glaring omissions? Yes, Jordan for sure… Lebron also… Diego Maradona and Cristiano Ronaldo… Schumacher fell off the list… I don’t think this list takes sports in high regard.
This list is much better now that it’s been revised, but I’d still say the most glaring omission would have to be Michael Jordan, right?
Not one jazz musician on the list that I could find.
louis armstrong was on
i did to the All quiz (where you name the full list) – if you have any on other quizzes that should be fixed just let me know in the comments for that quiz.
Please accept just ‘Buddha’. I may disagree with many of the people on this list (I think it’s way too heavy on ancient Europeans) but great quiz anyway.
We’re making history for 2000+ years so it’s only natural the prevalence of Europeans. On a side note… is this the first quiz to reach 300 recorded results? You now need 74 guesses to enter the scoreboard.
Sorry for the formatting of the above comment.
fixing these – thanks.
Great! Three others I forgot to mention: “Leonidas I” is required instead of just “Leonidas”, I think “Amenhotep IV” should probably be accepted for “Akhenaten”, and “Octavian” should probably be accepted for “Augustus”.
got em, thx.
A couple more: I think “Nebuchadrezzar” is a typo for “Nebuchadnezzar”, “Starkey” should probably be accepted for Ringo Starr (Richard Starkey), and “Charles Dodgson” and “Samuel Clemens” (their real names) should be accepted for the pen names “Lewis Carroll” and “Mark Twain”.
got the new ones too, thx.
Sorry, didn’t see it. My bad
Great quiz. Perhaps accept Al-Ghazzali with one Z has that seems to be the English standard?
I guessed Bieber, and was correct. I need to shower.
Is Queen Victoria really missing in this list? Or did I something wrong?
(Salk and Van Leeuwenhoek also missing, saving millions of lives by their discoveries isn’t enough to make list, so much for the general interest in medical sciences)
she missed by a couple hundred.
Loved seeing “pirate completed”.
This is a fascinating quiz – could you maybe post a version with no time limit so we can play through at our leisure and have time to look people up and read about them while playing? Maybe one with no leaderboard.
You should accept Bruegel as an alternative spelling for Brueghel.
The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.
There’s also some clear mistaken omissions, especially if you look at the master list. Lots of fairly obscure classical composers in the top 1000 (Offenbach, say, or Smetana), but Brahms is not anywhere in the top 10,000. There’s no way that makes any sense. I’m also not impressed by the inclusion of antediluvian Biblical characters whom nobody except fundamentalists thinks were real people (Methuselah, Enoch), while excluding, for some reason, Noah, who is actually at least well-known. The Biblical patriarch Jacob is not included, even though his father, grandfather, and second wife are included.
And, yeah, the algorithm obviously gives a bit too much credit for being ancient. Beyond the obscure Roman emperors, check out the obscure pharaohs – Ramesses I? Hor-Aha? Sneferu?
I had a lot of the same questions. After entering Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and Wagner, I thought that, while I love Brahms and he was undoubtedly a master of the Romantic era, perhaps he simply wasn’t influential enough. But when I saw I some composers on the list who make Offenbach look influential and important, I emailed the makers of the list. They said that there was an error in their data collection method that missed a few people who should clearly be in the Pantheon set, including Brahms. I assume this explains some of the other puzzling omissions.
I also asked how they decided if a person was “real”. They said that they didn’t deliberately decide — they used the Freebase data set and accepted anyone with a “date of birth, place of birth, and cultural domain”. No matter what criteria you use, including or excluding religious figures will be controversial. I would question whether a default birthdate of 3500 BC should be considered a true birthdate.
Whether or not you think they belong on the list, if you are going to include the religious figures, 3500 BC is still an unsatisfactory birth date for many of these figures. If he was a real person, Judas would have been about the same age as Jesus, not 3500 years older. They told me they are working to align contemporaries when possible, which returns us to the question about the birthdate as part of the inclusion criteria for these figures.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve known Brahms and Ramesses since I was a little kid. Agree with you about the obscure Roman emperors and biblical characters. On the other hand, I was actually surprised about some omissions, like Heidegger, Gagarin, Dumas, Mingus and even Ringo Starr being more famous than Mick Jagger.
added many alternates – thx for the suggestions.
Also, criticizing celebrities like Rihanna, Katy Perry, Jenna Jameson, etc. is fine, but this list seems to get very obscure in classical history. Three of the four emperors in the namesake year are among the thousand most famous people? Didius Julianus and two Valentinians make the cut? There’s messy stuff all around.
Some notes: Laozi should have more spellings, Lao-tzu, Lao-tze, Lao-tse, etc.
Judas Iscariot shouldn’t require more than Judas
Consistency: Saint is required for St. George, St. James, but not others
Hannibal and Hamilcar Barca-surname shouldn’t be required
Garcia Marquez and Garcia Lorca should be the answers for those two writers-Marquez and Lorca shouldn’t be acceptable, but whatever.
Vitruvius is usually known by Vitruvius.
Timur-i-leng should have Tamerlane accepted
Kublai, Batu, and Genghis Khan shouldn’t have their title required.
If you’re going to give bonuses for completing a category, it would be nice to separate out the different categories (in the “Rank” menu). Otherwise, weird, fun quiz.
“Giotto di Bondone” is simply known as “Giotto” in Italy, so I think the latter name should be accepted; you have to type “Honoré (well, Honore) de Balzac” to get the writer, but “Balzac” should be accepted
Haha, “pornographicator completed” when entering the name of a certain actress. Good one!
I’d change the time bonus to 69 seconds for that one. 😉
Weird methodology on the project, with some very weird results. But very fun quiz.
Wow, some super bizarre classifications – Moliere is best known as an actor?
Formula 1 has more worldwide following than both baseball and golf so it’s only natural to see Schumacher there. Lists like these will always be controversial… Lady Gaga is on the first half of the list but Margaret Thatcher is nowhere to be seen. Alexander #5? Questionable… It can fuel good discussions though.
Some curious choices by MIT’s methodology– Katy Perry over Mick Jagger? Jenna Jameson over Marilyn Monroe? Michael Schumacher over Babe Ruth and Tiger Woods?
You’ve outdone yourself this time. This is the greatest quiz I’ve ever played!
A bit out of my league here but on the other hand great room to improve. Great quiz!
muhammad
how are you spelling the founder of Islam?
fojin: will add soon….jlk: yeah i guess many people could be classified different ways, but i went with how Pantheon did it.
Surely Leonardo da Vinci is primarily an artist, rather than an inventor (he didn’t actually invent any actual working inventions, notably).