Two thousand years of recorded lives

The HPI score (0-100) measures how globally recognized a figure is, based on Wikipedia coverage and engagement. The eager-loaded tiers cover everyone the average user will recognize; the deeper tiers (HPI < 70) hold the long tail and only load on demand.

Pre-1500 in century buckets, 1500-onward in decade buckets. The dataset's age-threshold for inclusion is why 2000s drops sharply — recent births haven't yet accumulated the fame to register.

Sports has the largest share — globally tracked athletes have well-documented birthdates. Politicians and entertainers follow. The smaller "business" category reflects how recent a phenomenon "famous business person" is in historical terms.

Computed live from the 7,640 highest-fame figures. Each percentage shows what share of these entries have that type as their dominant. Loading…

Lives that ended (so still-living figures are excluded) grouped by their dominant type. Reflects who happened to die early vs late among the famous figures we have data for — not a claim about which type tends to live longer.

For each dominant type (rows), the heatmap shows how often each secondary type (columns) appears in position 2 of the sequence. Darker cells = more common pairing. The diagonal is empty because a type can't be its own secondary.