My question was to name the three most cited individuals in history,
in order.
I received the following nominations, ranked by number of votes
Freud, Darwin, Einstein [4 each]
Aristotle, Plato, Chomsky [3 each]
Shakespeare [2]
Confucius, Jefferson, Aquinas, James (William, not Jesse or Henry),
Lenin, Marx (Karl, not Groucho), and Jesus [1 each]
Using a 1, 2, 3 system for the top 3, the rank ordering of the top 3
according to your votes is:
Einstein and Darwin are tied for no. 1 and 2
Freud is no. 3
That's close but no cigar. My source is an obituary in the Sunday
Times (Sepember 7, 1997), where Helmuth Nyborg, a Danish psychologist
is quoted on this matter.
He said the list is:
1. Karl Marx
2. Sigmund Freud
3. Stephen Black
No, he didn't. He actually had Hans Eysenck in third place, a claim
which I find hard to accept, despite Eysenck's acknowledged great
contributions to psychology. Apparently, Nyborg made this claim in
his 1997 book _The Scientific Study of Human Nature: Tribute to Hans
J. Eysenck at 80_, which I haven't read.
But surely this is a difficult matter to determine, even in this Age
of the Computer, and I have no idea whether there's more to Nyborg's
claim that a guess. Beth contributed a list from Judge Richard Posner
of "public intellectuals", and the judge apparently derived his list
in a systematic manner, although I didn't spend time trying to
understand it. But his conclusion that, of all people, Henry
Kissinger, leads the list as the number 1 public intellectual boggles
the mind and calls his methodology into question. Henry Kissinger?
Leading intellectual? Geddoutahere!
An easy but suspect way of deriving a list is to see how many Google
hits each man (because that's what they are) gets. It's suspect
because Google hits are very different from citations. But it's
certainly easy. For what it's worth, here are the results, per
million hits, and with no concern for conflation of names.
God: 62.30
Christ: 18.90
Jesus: 9.12
Newton: 7.83
Shakespeare: 5.82
Jennifer Lopez: 4.92 ( OK, I do realize she's not a man]
Darwin: 4.25
Einstein: 3.79
Marx: 3.21
Freud: 2.04
Skinner: 2.00
Brad Pitt: 1.62
Aristotle: 1.24
Chomsky: 0.77
Eysenck: 0.55 (so he hardly rates)
Kissinger: 0.48 (him too)
(Funny thing. I re-did them just before sending and they were all up
substantially, one ranking even changing place. I guess the Google
hits aren't stable for some reason)
If we disallow deities on the grounds that they're not really
intellectuals, even if they are all-knowing (although
we'd then have to remove Freud for the same reason), then it has not
escaped my notice that the intellectual receiving the most number of
hits is Newton ("God said, Let Newton be! And all was light")
This may reflect the technological bias of the web. Can anyone
name another who might attract a greater number of hits? And I'd like
to hear whether anyone thinks it plausible that Eysenck could rank so
high in citedness.
Stephen
______________________________________________
Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470
Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661
Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7
Canada
Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy
TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at
http://faculty.frostburg.edu/psyc/southerly/tips/index.htm
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