Map showing birthplaces of "notable people" around the world | Hacker News Reader

Map showing birthplaces of "notable people" around the world

tjukanovt.github.io

924 pointsjbesomi332 comments

This data's definition of "famous" or "notable" is in the "Measuring notability" section of the linked paper:

we build a synthetic notability index using five dimensions to figure out a ranking for this broader set of individuals. These dimensions are:

1. the number of Wikipedia editions of each individual; [i.e. number of languages in which this person has a Wikipedia article]

2. the length, i.e total number of words found in all available biographies. […]

3. the average number of biography views (hits) for each individual between 2015 and 2018 in all available language editions […]

4. the number of non-missing items retrieved from Wikipedia or Wikidata for birth date, gender and domain of influence. The intuition here is that the more notable the individual, the more documented his/her biographies will be; [!]

5. the total number of external links (sources, references, etc.) from Wikidata.

We then determine the quantile values from each dimension and add them all to define our notability measure

They also have a table of what this metric throws up as the most "notable" from each time period: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4/tables/3 and how the "domain" varies over time: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4/figures/2 (note Nobility and Religious in 500–1000, to Sports and Culture post 1950).

Zoomed into the area around Jerusalem and found the following:

Natalie Portman - notability rank 221

Jesus - notability rank 204.5

Go a bit further north to Haifa, and you'll find Gene Simmons with a notability rank of 2136.

FWIW, it seems like the ranks are an inverse scale where lower means more notable - Jesus is more notable than Natalie Portman according to the index.

Ah yes I see it now. She's close though!

John Lennon once famously claimed the Beatles were "More popular than Jesus" [1]. His notability index is 27. I guess he must have been right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_popular_than_Jesus

To be fair, Wikipedia has access to a lot more primary and secondary sources for people in the 20th century than for people in the first, so I don’t know that Wikipedia is the best metric.

I think Natalie Portman also beats Jesus in terms of her Erdős–Bacon number and her H-index

She has an Oscar and a couple Golden Globes too, I don't think Jesus has won any major film awards

I mean... not yet - only his biggest fans are aware of the ever-imminent return to the forefront of pop culture, duh.

Thanks so much for digging this out! Very useful to know. So, the notability methodology fails massively, as many have noted. Jesus and Muhammad trailing Britney Spears by a factor of 4 or so is my favorite so far ... LOL. But the question becomes, how can the notability be improved. Of course "AI" is probably the answer here, in the same way it is becoming the answer to so many questions/problems. (Just as the answer to every legal question is "it depends".) Two elements pop to mind: (i) Accessing more things outside of the Wikipedia/Wikidata database. (ii) Within the Wiki world, making associations like Jesus ~ Christian ~ bible ~ best selling books.

> Jesus and Muhammad trailing Britney Spears by a factor of 4 or so is my favorite so far

To play devil's advocate (edit: pun entirely not intended!), I'd bet that way more people today could correctly identify a photo of Britney Spears than an accurate rendition of either Jesus's or Muhammed's faces. Obviously this map isn't supposed to be most "recognizable" people, but I think there's something to be said about whether the person itself is different from the mythos around them (which may or may accurately describe their life).

> an accurate rendition of... Muhammed's faces.

Accurate depictions of Muhammed[0] are difficult to come by.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depictions_of_Muhammad

Ah, right, I actually had known about that before, but I must have forgotten! It would be interesting to see if there weren't as much controversy around depicting Muhammed whether the common versions today would be accurate; depicting Jesus isn't discouraged at all in Christianity, but centuries of Europeans depicting him looking like them have established a common trope of a white, fair-haired Jesus, which would not have been at all what he actually looked like given where and when he was from. Given that Islam has been much more continuously practiced in the region where Muhammed lived, I imagine that depictions of him probably wouldn't have been as egregiously inaccurate in terms of race, although it's possible other sorts of cultural expectations might have been adopted over the years.

1) Apply a discount on notability for people based on how near their birthdate is to now. If Hammurabi and Jordan Peterson have the same score, Hammurabi should win by far.

2) Use an additional book corpus. Someone mentioned in books from 1500, 1800 and 2022 should score higher than someone popular in only one era.

Jean-Paul Sartre is shown as the most famous people born in Colombia

I think Simon Bolivar or Shakira or Gabriel Garcia Marquez or many others have a better claim to the title

Especially since Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris

What's weird is that wikidata has the correct info https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9364

Changed from Paris to Bogotá on 9 November 2018 by someone from 190.145.246.250 . https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q9364&diff=785288...

Change back to Paris on 22 December 2018‎.

On 17 March 2019‎ 2a01:e35:8ab4:ac00:75c3:3673:f22b:4a45 changed to Tokyo.

On 30 September 2019‎ 201.187.105.154 changed to Chile.

On 16 January 2020‎ changed to Efflamm.

On 16 January 2020‎ changed to Paris, where it's been ever since.

This signature tells us the dataset for the paper was extracted in November or December of 2018.

Various other bits of high-schooler sabotage:

30 September 2019‎ 201.187.105.154 changed place of death to Easter Island.

29 November 2018‎ 190.247.191.178 changed place of burial to Bikini Bottom.

7 March 2019‎ 201.164.233.103 changed cause of death (P509) to cocaine.

Hilarious view of what is going on behind the scenes, thanks!

Simon Bolivar was born in Caracas, Venezuela, though, it is shown as the most famous person there

Does Pablo Escobar belong in that conversation? Or am I like many others who have just been exposed to the show Narcos which makes up the entirety of our Colombian experience?

I like coffee a lot, so when Colombia comes up, coffee is the first thing that crosses my mind.

I understand that everyone consume different things :P

Imhotep was shown as born in Congo 2 hours ago, now it does not appear, I guess they are still trying to figure out

Very nice, I'm missing the city names though :)

Crazy how little women there are, it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Let's hope it gets a lot more mixed!

They weren’t ignored. For most of recorded history the basic unit was the family.

The men were in charge of public affairs of the family, while women were in charge of private and domestic affairs.

It was only recently the basic unit has been further subdivided into individuals, which required many to rely on institutional support on matters that used to be within the family, eg education, pensions, restaurants, clothing shops, apartment complexes, birth control.

The truly ignored throughout history were the peasants and serfs. Most men of significance were from aristocratic or upper class upbringings.

The divide is not between men and women, but haves vs have nots.

Fame is such a bizarre and frankly perplexing concept. It does not equate to achievement, to competence or success per se. It says nothing of the goodness or value of a person, the wealth they created, the families they raised, the hearts they broke, and very little of the suffering and joy they experienced as actual people. It's an ever-fading trace left in the (mostly) written records of institutions, where the narrow spotlight of social consciousness shone at some time.

What I find most interesting as I explore history and civilisation is the marginal web that supports what is "notable". Almost every breakthough has a "revisionist" version of someone else who made a simultaneous advance. Or allegedly had the limelight stolen from them. Every Crick and Watson have their Rosalind Franklin. For every Charles Babbage and Alan Turing there's an Ada Lovelace or Mavis Batey. And yet those are at least "noted". Who and what lies behind those figures in the third and fourth rows of history's group photograph, "fame"?

When people used to live in small villages and interacted with no more than 50-100 people in a life time, what was valued is completely different from what is valued today.

Back then they valued honor and integrity. Now what matters is first impressions, “clout”/fame, and standing above the crowd.

In today’s society we no longer value things like domestic affairs, honor, integrity, and humbleness. Now we try to maximise visibility, fame, and brand.

There is probably a huge forgotten mass of people who humbly did their work, improved their local communities as they needed, and raised the next generation. Those who specifically seek fame will easily outcompete these humble people.

> Back then they valued honor and integrity. Now what matters is first impressions, "clout"/fame, and standing above the crowd.

I think you're right about all those things J7ke. Values have really shifted. Yet that still leaves strange unanswered questions that puzzle me.

Most all of the intelligent people I know are deeply unhappy about it. And I've worked with a good few "famous" people. They were all unhappy too. Now we're all older, and great levellers like health, children and life fulfilment have come into play those that survived (drugs and more money than they could handle) are happier being "nobody" again (or at least getting recognised occasionally on the bus by strangers who say "Didn't you used to be...?"). I actually think many who were "successful" and had their 15 minutes feel tricked. Even though they "made it", in the sense of "Being there", they were never there. The cake was a lie.

By contrast, my father and grandfather's generation lived through awful, awful times, in wars, rationing, brothers and sisters died, and they were certainly never "on" the TV or Internet. If they had recognition it was a medal and a parade. However they seemed to go to their graves with a sense of having lived.

What does it mean then, when we talk about "what matters"?

Is "what matters" a cruel trick and illusion? Perhaps a way to rob us of the ordinary well-lived life that really does matter?

Thank you for having a nuanced take beyond just the notion of groups being surpressed.

you say this as a linear progression, but you're only paying attention to certain written histories and ignoring a lot of anthro/archaelogical research of (large-scale post discovery of agriculture societies) cases where it was otherwise

I went looking to see who the entry was for the nearest town to where I live expecting it to be Mary Somerville and was rather disappointed to find it was some chap I'd never heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville

Worth noting:

"In 1834 she became the first person to be described in print as a 'scientist'"

That's what the term was coined for; the older term was "man of science"

Crazy how people think we have been only ignoring 50% of our potential when we were ignoring like 95%.

I don't understand

Basically economic factors are a way bigger source of discrimination than gender will even be.

Way harder to fix because no one wants to do affirmative action for young boys born in trailer parks.

Yes, I would much rather be a rich woman than a poor man. But I'd rather be a poor man than a poor woman. I'd rather be a poor white man than a poor black man. I'd rather be a poor black man than a poor black woman.

I don't think it helps to have a contest about which forms of discrimination are more impactful, because they all add up.

Gender, race, social class, within which nation's borders one is born... they all add up, and it gets worse if you "lose" in more than one category.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality

But there are cases when the comparison should be made, and I hint at it in my first sentence. We do spend more effort on gender equality than racial equality because, frankly, white women have more power and value in our society than black men or women. For example the #MeToo movement was triggered and driven by the injustices done to powerful, privileged white women.

Sadly, social justice is driven too often by self-serving interests rather than social justice itself.

How many potential geniuses ended up herding yaks, or becoming chemical process workers, or died in some pointless war as cannon fodder, or in some hospital due to substandard care?

Potential is cheap and abundant. Using it is what changes the world.

> Using it is what changes the world.

Being recognized for it is what changes the world.

I’d guess the 5% is some form of privileged elite. I see that.

To quote Stephen Jay Gould:

> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

If you look at the list for the most famous people of all time, and especially for men[1], a large majority seem to have originated (and even remained all their life) outside what most people would consider the "privileged elite". Notably absent are some of the wealthiest individuals of all time, Crassus, Jakob Fugger, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller.

Of course, it doesn't disprove being born in favourable circumstances can and will affect your quality of life. But this list seems largely indifferent to how much money or power daddy has.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4/tables/3

>it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Let's hope it gets a lot more mixed!

I'm so sick of shit like this. It's so intellectually offensive, I can't be polite any longer.

It's so incredibly rude to dismiss so many great women just because you didn't hear about them, as if being famous is the ultimate test of potential. As if being a famous author or famous SOMETHING is the ultimate goal in this life.

I'll use my mother as an example. She's a truly great woman. She'll never be famous to you (she has no such vain desires anyway), but she's a great human being, much greater than you'll ever be, for she rejects DEMOGRAPHIC quotas, she's honest, and compassionate, and pious, and loving, and fun, and courageous, and every day she lives up to her potential and more, and she inspires her family and friends to do the same. She does what she does and she loves doing it and she does it well.

And how willfully ignorant it is to ignore the different powers and motivations unique to men and to women.

If you think there's a problem with so few famous women, then that's a personal problem, that's a you problem. You are the problem, because you are imposing your own personal beliefs and personal standards onto women.

You can help:

https://ideas.ted.com/you-can-help-fix-wikipedias-gender-imb...

https://www.wikiloveswomen.org/

There must be other initiatives if others have links to share in this thread.

Gender Content bias is a systemic thing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia

If your criteria is "Wikipedia notability", we have been ignoring more like 98 per cent of our potential since antiquity. By far the most people who lived and died were subsistence farmers, most of them not even personally free (either serfs or slaves), and good luck making it to Wikipedia as a serf boy from Upper Nowhere, rural Campania of 635 AD.

Sometimes I wonder whether the entire contemporary American obsession with race and gender has been deliberately and cynically manufactured or at least blown up beyond all proportion to keep everyone's eyes away from class, the most formidable societal barrier almost everywhere, including societies that are ethnically fairly homogenous.

Current estimates are that around 100 billion people have ever lived. So that's a lot more than 50% that have been "ignored".

It turns out that if you look for notability or exceptional attributes you will get mostly men. This is due to biology and essentially the whole reason males and sexual reproduction exists.

This doesn't mean that being male will give you a better chance of being exceptional or notable, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. The bar is lower for women because simply being a woman is considered notable precisely because there are so few notable women.

You can enable city names in left upper corner with "Show real place names" option

There is an option in the top left that allows you to show city names. Unfortunately, you cannot see the city names and the people names at the same time.

You can toggle between people and location names on the left.

Look in areas that were settled more recently, like the US west coast, and you'll find more women.

But definitely not 50%.

There's a radio button to show the city/country names instead on the left hand side.

> it's like we have been ignoring 50% of our potential.

Well, most all had a mom...

And sisters and daughters... But somehow they never had the same opportunities to get on this "Famous People" list. Last week I told my Daughter she can be a knight (although granted she usually wants to be a princess), and I felt weird and then I felt extra weird.

> she can be a knight She cannot unless you mean cosplay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc

I think we agree a lot of good work goes unrecognized. Just pointing out no one works truly alone.

Off topic: I imagine parenting must feel extra weird. :)

Maybe society doesn't have high enough expectations of women.

Or maybe men don't have high expectations of women, or because they benefit from women having a subservient position, aren't very inclined to change society.

I suppose this is actually representing the most famous people in the -western world's lens- rather than the most famous people to each country respectively. For example, Haruki Murakami is a Japanese author, very famous in the west because their books have been translated into English. But would they be the most famous person from Kyoto to people in Japan?

That's something that's always fascinated me about the internet, it's essentially delineated by language and not country. If you google things in Spanish, you get the spanish web. If you google things in Japanese, you get the Japanese web. For a subtle example of this, there's very little crossover between Japanese memes and English memes, it's a whole different web. Japanese web design is also famously different to western web design, it's formed it's own set of UX expectations and principles.

it's representing the most famous people in wikepedia and wikidata for 7 languages. The detail are here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4#Sec1

While it’s good to have the appropriate facts, that is only tangential to OPs point…

eh - I vaguely disagree. I think most of the people in the US are also off (or at least historically "dated").

Even without looking, I could pretty immediately tell that this was wikipedia data, since most of the names are "textbook famous".

So really - we're both saying that the word "famous" was probably the wrong pick. Should have just said "Map of wikipedia's most known people from every city" and then the skew is clear.

It's very much western lense. It's what would a foreigner know in this part of Asia

Ok, how about this: scrape Wikipedia in multiple languages, combine the notability data, and assign weights to appropriate locations. For example notability in Japanese Wikipedia would have more weight in locations where they speak Japanese.

Yes, I realize location != language and it would get tricky in locations with multiple languages like Switzerland or countries with big diasporas. The dataset would still be biased as not all languages have Wikipedia.

It would be a small step into the right direction.

What? It seems directly related to me.

There's a lot of discussion here of the 'western lens' as you bring up, but I'm not sure that's fair criticism. The creator(s) aggregated data and built something very interesting. To complain that the data they used isn't universal doesn't seem fair. I think Wikipedia is a reasonable starting place, but yes, Wikipedia skews geographically.

All datasets have bias. It's okay to acknowledge that and still find insights in the data.

Honestly curious: what highly accessible dataset that allows for the simple creations of 'fame metrics' would be better? I'm not aware of any.

It wasn't a criticism, of course something like this is limited by the data available and that's no the fault of the author. I was just musing on what might be a side effect of using what's available.

There wouldn't be a 'total complete and true set' of data for this task, since not all countries use wiki's to the same extent, and languages don't actually delineate between country (eg: Spanish wikipedia is not exclusively the view of people from Spain, nor is English wikipedia exclusively the views of people from England).

Sorry, I wasn't complaining about your post specifically, just a general tenor that kind of shits on this work because of an unsolvable problem: as you say there's actually no comprehensive dataset that would make it possible.

Your original comment was valid and insightful. I replied to it because it triggered a lot of secondary criticism about sample bias, and those are the comments I was most trying to respond to.

Ah I see, thanks for the clarification. It's a fair defense, this is still definitely an awesome project!

More likely a search or wiki index.

Eg. Phil Collins isn't shown in favour of a cricketer from the early 20th century?

Sometimes things are imperfect, not racist.

Yeah, similarly Dorothea Jordan, 17th century actress, is ranked above John O'Shea, premiership footballer, or Thomas Francis Meagher, originator of the Irish flag, leader of the 1848 young irelanders rebellion against British rule, and later US general in the american civil war.

If you're going by contemporary sources, I'd expect O'Shea to be on top, if we're including historical sources, I'd expect Meagher to be on top, unless Dorothea has some significant fame elsewhere than her city of birth

I didn't mean to imply it was racist, the western world contains many races.

I don't see anything in your post dealing with race, so not sure what that poster is on about.

The word 'racist' didn't appear until your post. It's a shame we can't discuss obvious language bias without you becoming defensive about imagined sleights.

Favoring a Western lens or English language sources is racist, whether the word was used or not, insofar as it favors white people and the people white people care about. You might disagree with that definition, but it's not like the commenter above is the first person to use it that way.

> It's a shame we can't discuss obvious language bias without you becoming defensive about imagined sleights.

Just wait a few years, I feel like this nearly-satanic-panic level of sensitivity will pass. Maybe a decade or so.

Oh God I can't wait that long. It's so hard to make friends in North America right now.

As soon as I saw Leonardo DaVinci and Picasso for Italy and France, I knew this was going to be the western lens, haha. Would be interesting to select the country as a point of reference.

DaVinci, Picasso & other western artists also score highest on the list of most expensive paintings. Would you consider an economic view to be a more balanced measure of fame? Many of the buyers are Middle Eastern or Asian too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintin...

Do you think people from Asia would have a different perspective on who the most famous Italian and/or French people are?

I've never been to Asia, but if I had to make a bet on it, I'd say yes, they probably do have a different perspective on it.

France and Italy are "Western" countries.

Picasso was from Spain, so is it then the most famous from? or in? a Country

Picasso was from Málaga in the south of Spain and that is where he shows up on the map for me. Commenter perhaps mistook Spain for France.

From what I can see it's most famous IN that area, not "from". Looking in Australia I see a lot of not-australians.

Salman Rushdie is the most popular person in Mumbai by this standard, a good bet for Indians would be Sachin Tendulkar born in Mumbai

I had no idea who this was but I guessed cricketer. I guessed right. Seems like Westerners have better taste in Mumbai-ites than Indians do. I mean--noted author vs. guy who excels at weird ball 'n stick game.

On the language internet point, it's pretty amazing, yeah. For example, all the English youtube niches have Spanish language equivalents, and watchers of one are totally unaware that they are sitting right next to watchers of another. Like some sort of shadowverse.

A pity that so much language-agnostic material we'll never see because search engines and algorithms are so effective at this segregation. Translation is good enough for browsing in completely unknown languages for internet exploration fun, but only one at a time -- still waiting for a practical multilingual search engine.

This site is promoting a rather selective set of ”famous scientists”.

For example, in countries bordering Russia, science nobel laureates are missing, but racist pseudoscientists and UFO theorists are listed.

> For example, in countries bordering Russia, science nobel laureates are missing, but racist pseudoscientists and UFO theorists are listed.

Maybe those pseudoscientists and UFO theorists are more "well known" than the Nobel laureates? Also, these are not opposites: there are various examples of Nobel laureates that later became pseudoscientists (see Luc Montagnier [1]).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luc_Montagnier#Controversies

"Pseudoscientist" in those cases just means they came to disagree with the current dogma. See also people like Kary Mullis or John Ioannidis.

You can't have done real science at one point and then retroactively be declared a non-scientist by people who in many cases couldn't solve a simple equation, let alone conduct the research those people did. Mullis' case is especially ironic, I've heard him called a "conspiracy theorist" by people who use his invention on a daily basis.

This is also what it felt like to me.

I came back here to write pretty much this comment.

Do you not know the gender of Haruki Murakami, or are you just misgendering a man?

I didn't specify a gender at all, not out of some intentionality, that was just the most natural way for me to write that sentence. So I'm not sure what you're talking about frankly.

Answering a question I had looking at this amazing work, the data set has a heavy English influence, but they are aware of it and also worked toward mitigating the effect. From the source:

> This strategy results in a cross-verified database of 2.29 million unique individuals (an elite of 1/43,000 of human being having ever lived) among which 30% come from the 6 non-English editions of Wikipedia, a significant improvement over earlier works that have only focused on English Wikipedia only.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4

The difference between the EU and US is wild. EU is mostly historical figures, Picasso, Da Vinci, Erasmus, Van Gogh, and of course Adolf. But US, even though some old presidents, it's mostly pop & movie stars.

Yeah, EU has a much richer history since we don't know much about the US pre-1750.

Go over the Levant and you start seeing Paul the Apostle, Diogenes, Ptolemy, etc. which makes Voltaire look like a modern political commentator.

There are also a lot of historical figures in EU from 1750 - 1945. It's more that US has taken over the cultural dominance after the second world war.

And that it hasn't done so with philosophers, artists, scientist or dictators. But mostly with entertainers.

> Go over the Levant and you start seeing Paul the Apostle, Diogenes, Ptolemy, etc.

And Keanu Reeves! I had no idea.

Well, the linked study[1] does note an anglo-saxon bias:

> We document an Anglo-Saxon bias present in the English edition of Wikipedia, and document when it matters and when not.

Regardless of these biases, Europe has much more historical background than the US.

Finally, this data is based upon Wikipedia and Wikidata. I gather datasets from India or China would provide much different results.

Interesting project nonetheless!

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4

It's a cool map, now i would really want to play. If i could color code the names by birthdate it would be possible to get a great new insight in regional relevance over time. Also switching between current residence and birth place would be very interesting as well as color coding the distance between birth and current residence to see where attractive places are or how much of a role to become famous the embedding from birth would be.

Very cool project, and also reveals buggy data to fix.

One note if the creator is here: it looks like deprecated locations are included. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q596717 includes both Indiana (deprecated) and Linton, Indiana, and he shows up on the map near the center of Indiana apparently as its most notable person, which is clearly not the case.

A curious factor in this map is that to stop overlapping text, names are not shown if higher ranked names are nearby.

Peter Jackson at with respectable 'top 1000' score of 656 doesn't appear because he was born too close to Ernest Rutherford who edges him out at 634.

Andrew Niccol, who's films are somewhat more niche, gets on the map by virtue of being born a few kilometers north of Jackson.

it's funny how some people can't just enjoy the product as it is. imagine if the author had to customize it to please everyone's agenda.

Is this your first time on HN? 90% of comments are people either pedantically picking apart the submissions or, if its a product, plugging their own alternative without commenting on the submission at all

It doesn't really add much for someone to comment, "This is great! There's nothing about it that isn't amazing!"

No one wants any of that. I just think a balance of good and constructive criticism would add lots of value, but the internet isn't prepared to have that conversation.

Why should I be forced to enjoy the product as it is? It's one thing to make something like this for fun, but if you post it on an online link-sharing platform, you're bound to find people who don't enjoy what you've made.

Ok!

Which would make it even more complicated as some of the borders on the map are disputed.

The most bizarre thing I found is the 'notability' score for Jesus at 204.5 and Muhammad at 152. Both well behind Britney Spears at 59. Britney's fans will be thrilled, I guess.

Clicking around, the notability of Western pop culture folk generally seem enormously inflated.

More people seen Britney than Jesus...

Notability seems highly inflated towards recent and pop culture.

Like favouring Neil Gaiman over Isambard Kingdom Brunel?

Some of this doesn't seem correct? For example, I was surprised to see that Ken Jeong was Canadian (shown up and to the right of Michael J Fox, in what looks like Northern Saskatchewan). But I looked it up and he was born in Detroit.

Caught that too. George Washington is showing up in PA

Lots of surprises (to me) scrolling around. J.R.R.Tolkien and Freddie Mercury from Africa. George Orwell and Cliff Richard from India. Some wrongs, though. I see JP Sartre in South America, but the link says Paris.

>George Orwell and Cliff Richard from India.

Important to note it was British India at the time both were born.

Cliff's Anglo-Indian.

Cool idea, the main problem I saw when clicking around is that the granularity of people's place of birth (all via wikipedia) is not consistent. Like, one person has my city listed, so this person "owns" the entry for the city, but 10 other people have parts of the city listed (so their wikipedia entry is more correct), so they're listed for that part of town, be it an official part or not. For some people a specific building is known (usually not a hospital), so they "only" own this building. It's a bit weird.

I noticed the same thing. Boston, for instance has a ton of people in individual neighborhoods but smaller cities have one person representing the whole city.

Also, it relies on birth location. So someone who, say, left a city and moved at age 5 will be associated with the city they only lived in for 5 years not the one they spent their formatives years in.

Still a fun experiment, though.

Considering some of the people on there, the HN title could be "famous & infamous", or as the project puts it on the page, "Notable". Still, very awesome project!

Infamous people are definitionally famous.

I didn't understand the methodology. Turns out it's because my first data point was the result of an error in the source data.

I looked at Santa Fe, since I thought George R. R. Martin would be the most famous person there.

This says Anna Gunn is the most famous person from Santa Fe.

Okay, so perhaps Martin's a transplant, while Gunn was born there? The map legend says "birthplaces", after all.

Nope. At least, Wikipedia and IMDB says she was born in Cleveland, and her family moved to Santa Fe when she was young.

Though ... other sources say she was born in Santa Fe, like https://patch.com/new-mexico/albuquerque/3-celebrities-who-l... ?

But the source paper at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4 uses Wikipedia and Wikidata - both of which list Cleveland.

... Ah-ah! The place of birth entry for Wikidata changed on 3 August 2020 from Cleveland to Santa Fe. https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q271050&oldid=124...

And the Wikipedia entry changed on 31 August 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anna_Gunn&diff=86...

And the data from the paper was from 2018.

I wonder how bad the data is in the rest of the data set.

Might be worth updating this with the latest from Wikidata: It looks like Elliot Page [0] is listed under his birth name, with the wrong gender too. Just one example, but also I’m sure other things have changed :)

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Page

This is really fun! I even shared it with my family.

Please ignore the others who just fucking HAD to make it about race or gender or whatever.

This seems a little inaccurate. I've found John Pearse for my hometown in Hook, Hampshire. However Wikipedia indicates he's from Hook in Yorkshire.

I imagine this could be repeated quite often as there are so many reused place names. Hook in Yorkshire doesn't even get a look in on this map!

Wow this is amazing. A lot of places are known for a mid-level pro soccer player that you're unlikely to have heard of, unless you are very into it.

How does it know when it's appropriate to cut the dataset a little bit finer? I'm amazed how appropriate the names are that it turns up.

Shinzo Abe marked as "probably alive", so clearly some data is out of sync with WikiData.

The dataset is a snapshot and it's not reading the API. That's why I added the word "probably" there to somehow tackle this kind of unfortunate cases.

The website is amazing. Maybe we should start a discussion on some of the errors so they can improve the website. So far I know of Diego Maradona, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Washington, and Jake Gyllenhaal. Btw who are the people who ended up in the poles lmaooooo? Have no clue about any of them.

Some surprises when you find people in odd places or don't find them where you expect due to them being born somewhere obscure far from where they gained their fame. For example the "Greatest Canadian" (voted as such in some CBC special) Tommy Douglas does not appear in Saskachewan (most famous person here... Wrestler Roddy Piper actually) but rather a suburb of Edinburgh. Hey I'm learning something!

Would be tricker to compose a map that factors in where they lived independent from where they were born .

"In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people" (Momus, 1991)

http://imomus.com/index499.html

When i see young people around me share this with enthusiasm despite the environment that’s been created mostly because of social media, I can’t help but think if this was meant to be a warning.

Sir Howard Florey seems to have missed out in Adelaide completely.

Only the most significant person born in Australia, who's co-discovery in medicine has saved ~200 million lives in the last 80 years.

These are very political based. Trust me the most famous person from Chicago is not Hillary Clinton.

How about Walt Disney, Robin Williams, Kanye West, Hugh Hefner?

Why was Hillary selected? Lol feels like a sampling bias.

There's plenty of discussion in this thread on the methodology.

Clearly Hillary has a longer and more verbose Wikipedia entry than any of those other people, which is no way surprising considering her length of tenure as a high profile national politician.

You could be more helpful by presenting your superior approach to programmatically ranking 'fame'.

Yes, Che Guevara shows up in Argentina when it should be Messi

Maradona too

This user found Maradona hanging out in northern Colombia, where he's losing the notoriety war to Gabriel García Marquez.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32275300

Also Hillary moved to Park Ridge when she was 3 years old, she likely has no memory of her time living in Chicago. An odd choice.

I don’t think Charlie Chaplin is the most famous Londoner

It's hard to imagine someone more famous than Charlie Chaplin.

Jesus Christ

JC was actually born in Luton. He didn't move to London until he was 7.

I thought it was Bethlehem?

Another weird data oddity...it's show Jake Gyllenhall as being born in Los Angeles, Texas, but he's actually from Los Angeles, California.

Wildly incorrect in my region at least. Seems like one of the sources is sports databases, as most are (to me) completely unknown soccer players.

The source seems to be Wikipedia.

I wonder what they mean by "notable". Notable folks from my town include announcers for major sports teams, a famous cartoonist, a former director of an international organization, and a Grammy winning musician (among others).

The map indicates the "notable" from my town is a playbook centerfold that married an football player and wrestled a few times, who I had to actually look up.

I always fancied saying to Brad Pitt when I see him, "Ever go to Bea Brittons and play songs on the table's jukebox?". He grew up in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

I spent a lot of time searching and playing songs on the jukebox there, which had all these little remote units for selecting songs on each table. I still wonder what the network for that looked like.

Small algorithmic feedback: George Washington was located to the wrong Westmoreland County! (He's from VA, not PA)

This app is using Wikidata and actually you can change it.

It seems "cities of the most famous people" instead of "most famous people from every city" to me.

This map has huge generational and institutional biases.

Who is Lee Norris of Greenville, NC? Does anyone know of him here?

I can tell you 8/10 people under 20 know who Mr Beast is.

Does being the leading content producer on the leading content platform not make you more "notable" than someone who had two backing roles on 90's TV sitcoms?

Wikidata has MrBeast listed as being born in Wichita, KS, where he's competing with Joe Walsh for notability. There's probably still a very reasonable argument to be made that MrBeast is more notable, but it's much less clear than Lee Norris.

Dev feedback: It seems the map can get in this weird state where the "focus" is on the horizon rather than the center of the globe, and you can no longer rotate it sensibly. Maybe the rotations get gimbal locked or something? Fixed by refreshing the page. Safari on MacBook Air / trackpad.

All I have got in Firefox is a blue ball.

Creator here. I've restricted the access token for the data to only incoming traffic from that specific domain (tjukanovt.github.io), so maybe Firefox is doing something weird there. As if you can't access the tileset, you only get that blue ball.

Works for me with Firefox 102/Linux

Me too: Firefox 103, macOS. And I did turn off uBlock Origin.

The Planet is a blue ball if you point to Eastern Island

Just like real life.

Ha, nice visualization. Some surprises, e.g. I didn't know about Orwell, but literature isn't my strong suite.

The data source seems a bit outdated, as it has Elliot Page still listed as Ellen Page (or there is some other notable person with that name which I don't know).

I'm surprised by the data, to be honest. I've never heard of either of the two "famous" people shown in my hometown. Strange considering we're known for a very famous actress and a very famous hockey player, neither of which showed up at all.

I've lived in about 15 different locations, and the only names I recognize are in very major cities, and one 2nd-largest-in-state city. I have the impression that I've heard of famous people coming from the other towns in the past but I can't remember the specifics.

Just alt-tabbed from an OpenStreetMap chat to HN and took "map" in the title as a verb. Mildly disappointed I don't get to map with them! (Was already wondering how this was going to work, figured it probably means the most well-known mapper or so.)

This is wonderful. I just learnt that a composer I love the music of was born where I currently live (Michael Nyman) and that some of my favourite actors come from where I grew up (UK South coast).

Great idea, good way to learn more about people and places.

This is a fantastically fun project. You can lose hours just wandering around the globe. Its things like this that remind you why the internet can be such a glorious thing. Its inaccurate and with few uses, but so what, its fun!

I didn't know Frida Kahlo was the most famous mexican, but I guess some famous mexicans I'd have thought of (say, Benito Juárez) are mostly famous locally and not globally. EDIT: their rank difference is huge, 156 vs 1733.

Well, Cullen Eddy from Hidden Valley is certainly in the wrong county of pennslyvania.

It's a neat project, but does it ignore movie stars?

I zoomed into my hometown of Springfield, MO where Brad Pitt is from and he wasn't listed. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure he is a globally recognized actor.

It uses Wikidata as its data source, which has Brad Pitt listed as being born in Shawnee Oklahoma: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q843999

Ah - my mistake then. I assumed since he went to high school here, he was from the area. TIL!

But hey, at leas the fictional Jason Bourne apparently hails from Nixa, MO, so I've got that.

Is this just for city in world; do people = lookupNotableOnWikipediaForCity(city); for person in people; do rank = rankPeople(person); storeRank(rank, person, city); done; done

With some obvious logic behind the ranking algorithm?

It looks more like for each (top X notable people) print on map with location, and as you zoom out make the less notable people fade out

What are those guys doing at the poles? Pretty sure that William Lounsbery wasn't born in Antarctica. There's also a Finnish politician born near the North Pole.

The container for the radio buttons stretches to at least to the center, isn't visible, and prevents clicking/tapping on map items. This is on mobile in FF.

Jan Czochralski

Notability rank: 78172.5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Czochralski

wow, very low

Justly so

Came here to complain about the data accuracy, but I see I was beaten to it.

I’ll just add that this has an “interesting” number of people born at the north and south poles.

Is the source code available on github or somewhere else?

It says the most famous person in my area was Ronald Ross, but he was only born there and left when he was 8. Also nobody in my state even knows about him.

I absolutely love it. So interesting to find out that the mayor of Kyiv was born pretty close to where I am now. Do you have any plans on monetizing it?

I was concerned for New York for a bit, since choosing one person must be brutal to all others. But apparently NYC actually consists of a ton of cities.

It is quite amusing to see Prince Phillip under the leadership section covering Greece and part of Italy while someone like Vasil Levski is omitted.

What is it using to calculate the ranking? Definitely wrong in Argentina, where Diego Maradona does not even appear when you filter by Sports (!).

This map is so awesome. I want to do somethings similar for a hobby of mine, i'll have to check how you did the progressive zooming thing.

I couldn't find Maxwell, which is weird since Maxwell is present in the source CSV. He should be placed somewhere in Edinburgh.

Fantastic site nonetheless.

That's because both Sean Connery and Maxwell have their birthplace as just "Edinburgh", and Connery's notability rank is 261, while Maxwell's is 683. So Connery is shown instead of Maxwell.

Seems to be eclipsed by Sean Connery, also from Edinburgh.

Today I learnt that George Orwell was born in India.

So it seems the most famous people everywhere have to do with politics ... particularly involved in the most deadly conflicts and wars.

MLK for Atlanta checks out.

(But then the most famous person from my town is Ryan Seacrest. That sounds about right but I don't have to like it.)

Very cool project. So onto the nitpicking! I couldn't find Diego Maradona in Argentina. It does list Lionel Messi, though.

ah! I was actually confused to find Maradona at the north of Colombia for some reason. The source dataset seems correct so something must have gone wrong with the map

I think they got El Pibe de Oro mixed up with Carlos "El Pibe" Valderrama, who astonishingly doesn't appear in Santa Marta or anywhere in Colombia.

Brian Blessed is more famous than Diana Rigg.

For my birthplace in France, mostly only names I’ve never heard of. Would be nice to be able to filter by time period.

if anyone interested here is the Github link to the source code => https://github.com/tjukanovt/tjukanovt.github.io/blob/master...

Jean Paul Sartre was colombian? what? :D

I noticed that too. Wikipedia says Paris. I think it is an error. I don't think he was born in Bogotá.

Some of the famous people are famous mythical people who possibly, or certainly, did not actually live.

Ahah this is neat, thanks for sharing! Enjoyed looking up my hometown and seeing who was there.

Apparently my hometown is famous for a french clothes designer born during the colonial era.

When I selected sports it got a bit buggy. Balotelli in Madrid, Maradona in Barranquilla.

According to this map Jean-Paul Sartre is from Colombia?!? He‘s born is Paris, France.

I quickly verified the data records [0][1] mentioned by the website, and indeed it shows France instead of Colombia:

---

$ zgrep -i Jean-Paul_Sartre cross-verified-database.csv.gz

Q9364,1905,1980,,circa,1905,1905,1980,1980,Male,Culture,Jean-Paul_Sartre,Western Europe,1905,1980,(...),France,'France',France,,D:_'France'_matchB1_P:_'France',France,Missing,enwiki(...)

---

So probably it's a mistake from "notable-people" rather than the original data record.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01369-4#Sec28

[1] https://data.sciencespo.fr/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10...

Weird. No famous people are noted at the house I grew up in.

Bad joke. This is amazing - thank you.

Why is the most famous person born in St. Petersburg Ayn Rand and not say Putin?

Fun. My biggest surprise so far is Ruggero Deodato. Did not expect to see him.

I'm sure George W. Bush would love to see his name in Connecticut.

There are some errors I think - According to wikidata & wikipedia the famous Diego Maradonna is not born in Colombia but Argentina. It strikes me as worrysome since this is such a famous person - I‘d rather expect such errors for less famous persons, right?

George Orwell, Richard Dawkins, etc some where really illuminating

Nice map, but the color palette causes some serious eye strain.

I feel bad for the city whose most famous resident is Ted Cruz.

Why is George Washington shown as being from Pennsylvania?

George Washington wasn’t born in Pennsylvania.

Santa Monica is... Sean Penn? Who made this?

Who should it be?

famous == celebrity here

It would be nice if you could select type of fame, since it's listed that way in Wikipedia

Would be cool if you listed the city!

Noam Chomsky over Will Smith for Philly, who doesn't show up at all? So wrong. The People Map seemed to get some more things right.

If you zoom in on Philly it seems like they position Grace Kelly in Center City and Noam Chomsky in North Philly somewhere. Noam Chomsky was actually born in North Philly (according to Wikipedia) - I can't tell what part of Philadelphia Grace Kelly should be associated with.

But then they don't have anyone in West Philly. I don't know if Will Smith is the most famous person associated with Philadelphia, but he is surely the famous person most associated with West Philadelphia.

There are people from Antarctica??

I checked all of them, and none seem to have actually been born in Antarctica :(

I would think being born in Antarctica is notable in itself!

All the entries hear appear to be errors though.

is there a way to extract the sorted list of people by fame? how was the fame list decided?

Cambridge UK shows John Maynard Keynes. I think Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton might dispute that!

Darwin, Hawking, and Newton are all on the map, in their places of birth like they should be.

Darwin was born in Shrewbury if I recall correctly. Newton in rural Lincolnshire. I don’t remember Hawking off hand but I suspect he wasn’t born there.

Check out North vs South Korea.

No Billy Connolly in Glasgow :(

would be interesting/cool having a similar map for parents of famous people

If you showed the “leadership” map you just generated to the peruvian people, at least 50% would turn on you…

strong proof that north and south pole births lead to a career in politics :-)

No one was ever born at either pole.

Leonardo da Vinci ahead of Hitler is pure fantasy.

95% of the population don't know who he was, his profession or are able to cite any of his work.

Everybody knows who Hitler is.

Mona Lisa vs. Hitler that I could see being a close one with maybe Mona Lisa ending up ahead. Still it would be Hitler IMHO.

But I don't think it's fair to attribute Mona Lisa fame to Leonardo

Everyone knows who da Vinci is in Europe, idk where you got the 95% figure from.

I challange you to try. Namedrop Hitler vs. Da Vinci and see how people react

Wow this page is awesome

Thank you, I love this!

Most part of Asian is covered by political figures while US is covered by artists.

Depends what you mean by "Asia" I guess but in the part I've looked at, not really. For Taiwan the largest names are Ang Lee (film director), Teresa Teng (singer), Jay Chou and Jolin Tsai (also singers). For HK, the actor Jackie Chan trumps anybody else. Hayao Miyazaki (animator) is one of the most prominent in Japan. And in South Korea around Seoul, there's Psy and a couple of other artists as well.

Wow this is super cool

This is really cool

Very cool map!

Huge recency bias though, with Obama and Trump on 1 and 2.

I wonder what the map would look like if you multiplied everyone's score with the number of people born in the same decade, and divided by the total score of people born in the same decade.

Amazing graphics.

Bill Gates didn't make the list of people who are famous

Hell yes they got Eminem right.

No one believes he's from Joe town.

Where’s Kobe?

Curious notability ranking. Obama is the No.1 ranking person and Trump the No. 2, Leonardo Da Vinci is No. 3.

Also was surprised to find that Audrey Hepburn is from Belgium (rank 158)...

I was also curious about how the "notability ranking" is calculated. Just looking at the American West:

Demi Lovato: 226.5

Demi Moore: 825, Tommy Lee Jones: 829, Dennis Hopper: 977.5, Woody Harrelson: 1319

Wait, what? Who the heck is Demi Lovato? I never even heard of her until I browsed her Wikipedia page.

i love that site ;) ty for posting

Interesting. For our small town in Germany (Lastrup) it's Ludger Gerdes [1]

But even tho not born in Lastrup, Özlem Türeci [2] who helped develop the Biontech Corona vaccine grew up here.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludger_Gerdes

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96zlem_T%C3%BCreci

Ayn Rand for St. Petersburg...

Hmm, I would have guessed Putin would out rank her, but maybe name changes affect things?

She shows up under culture. I'd have thought that Pushkin would have outranked her there, certainly outside the Anglosphere. Or one could make a case for Anna Akhmatova.

it frozen my browser

where is messi?

Overshadowed by Che Guevara. They belong to the same city.

Most famous when viewing USA while zoomed out is Donald Trump???

Is that really so surprising? He has been world famous since the 80s and was dominating headlines during his presidency.

So, Leonardo Da Vinci is #3, Hitler #4, I cannot find #1 and #2.

Barack Obama is #1. Trump is #2 :)

Trump is 2. Haven't found 1 yet

Explore the Pacific

---deleted---

Hitler is also on the map. "Famous" isn't the word used on the webpage - that can sometimes mean "celebrated". The word they use is "notable", which is perhaps more appropriate when talking about people who have committed heinous acts.

Hitler might be the most (in)famous person ever to have lived and so much so that his name has become a synonym for evil (colloquially). There is a reason that every page on Wikipedia is 6 clicks away from his article.

Not to go all Godwin, but Hitler is right there in Austria, visible from the farthest level of zoom.

Looking at Europe: Adolf Hitler

Yeah ofc it’s just Hitler you see.

why the FUCK did you use white text on a white globe?

Looks blue to me.

Nope, white as fuck: https://imgur.com/a/aXLg5Yg

Guessing you are not a native English speaker. Fuck is a very strong word that is very seldom used. Rap videos and movies are not representative of the real world.

well fuck...

I give you that :D

It's just a bug, not a design decision.

The globe is blue…?

nope

So Nikola Tesla was not notable enough? Or I just can't find it in Serbia or the US.

Tesla was born in modern-day Croatia. He's listed there.

Because he was not born in neither Serbia or the US.

Croatia.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9036

It's about birth places and he was born in the Austrian Empire, if you check Central Europe you find him right there.

Looking at the data - these locations are based on where they were born (not where they currently reside, or died).

It does say that at the top, but I too was initially confused as to why Charles Darwin was in Shrewsberry, rather than the place he lived for most of his adult life - the very splendid Down House https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/home-of-cha...

The most garbage map that I've ever seen.

Mumbai has 20 famous people (most of them I've never heard of) while missing hundreds of famous people.

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