Author Topic: Even in the TV reality-show era, our ticket to fame is really making things  (Read 4073 times)

Joe Carillo

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In “Who’s More Famous Than Jesus?”, an article that came out in the March 14, 2014 issue of The New York Times, Dwight Garnermarch reports on (among other fame categories) the “Most Famous People of the Last 6,000 Years” as determined by Pantheon, an interactive catalog of fame developed and run by the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the Top 10 of the list are, in this order: 1. Aristotle, 2. Plato, 3. Jesus Christ, 4. Socrates, 5. Alexander the Great, 6. Leonardo Da Vinci, 7. Confucius, 8. Julius Caesar, 9. Homer, and 10. Pythagoras.

RANKINGS IN THE PANTHEON CATALOGUE OF FAME

A NETWORK OF FAME ACCORDING TO PANTHEON—FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

According to Garnermarch, the M.I.T. team had decided that “you are legitimately famous if a Wikipedia page under your name exists in more than 25 languages.” And César Hidalgo, the project’s director, says that even in an era of Kardashians, actually making things matters a lot in the fame game. He explains: “Tangible achievements, whether these are songs, books, works of art or scientific discoveries, are better tickets to long-term immortality than the accumulation of material wealth.”

The Pantheon ranking system takes longevity into account, though, so that helps explain why many of its most famous people have been dead for at least 1,500 years.



Read Dwight Garnermarch’s “Who’s More Famous Than Jesus?” in The New York Times now!
« Last Edit: March 07, 2017, 04:58:36 PM by Joe Carillo »