Greeks top six millenia famous persons list

Fame comes in sorts of varieties, and as Clive James wrote, Jesus Christ was the first person to achieve it globally, “without conquering the world by violence.” But because of its elusive qualities fame is hard to quantify, especially if you have to account for locality, time constraints, the emergence of modern media, etc.

Pantheon, a new project from the Macro Connections group in M.I.T.’s Media Lab, is taking the idea a bit further and trying to do just that. It has collected and analyzed data on cultural production from 4,000 B.C. to 2010. With a few clicks on its website, which recently hit the net, you can swing through time and geography, making plain the output of, say, Brazil (largely soccer players) or Belarus (politicians). It also ranks professions from chemists to jurists to porn stars (No. 1 is Jenna Jameson; No. 2 is the Czech Republic’s Silvia Saint).

For Greeks it's a boon as five of the top ten personalities in world history. For now, one can be legitimately famous, according to the M.I.T. team, if a Wikipedia page under your name exists in more than 25 languages.

So who are the ten most famous people of the last 6,000 years:

1. Aristotle

2. Plato

3. Jesus Christ

4. Socrates

5. Alexander the Great

6. Leonardo Da Vinci

7. Confucius

8. Julius Caesar

9. Homer

10. Pythagoras

And who are the most famous footballers of the 20th Century:

1. Cristiano Ronaldo

2. Pelé

3. Lionel Messi

4. Ronaldo

5. Ronaldinho

6. Diego Maradona

7. Zinedine Zidane

8. David Beckham