Statistically, Who's the Greatest
Person in History?Why quants can't measure historic significance
"At most, the resulting rankings reflect only the preoccupations of the English-speaking world, and mainly the United States. Surely Jesus would not have done so well in China, to say nothing of all those American presidents. What Skiena and Ward have really done is take a particular version of Wikipedia, as of a certain day in 2010, and use a statistical model from Ngram to project changes, over time, from specific measures of Wikipedia “fame” on that day. It is a nice trick, but it doesn’t help us to rank historical figures in terms of significance."
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