Who's Bigger?: Where Historical Figures Really Rank 1st Edition

by Steven S. Skiena (Author), Charles B. Ward (Author)

23 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-1107041370

ISBN-10: 1107041376

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Is Hitler bigger than Napoleon? Washington bigger than Lincoln? Picasso bigger than Einstein? Quantitative analysts are rapidly finding homes in social and cultural domains, from finance to politics. What about history? In this fascinating book, Steve Skiena and Charles Ward bring quantitative analysis to bear on ranking and comparing historical reputations. They evaluate each person by aggregating the traces of millions of opinions, just as Google ranks webpages. The book includes a technical discussion for readers interested in the details of the methods, but no mathematical or computational background is necessary to understand the rankings or conclusions. Did you know: - Got a spare billion dollars, and want to be remembered forever? Your best investment is to get a university named after you. - Women remain significantly underrepresented in the historical record compared to men and have long required substantially greater achievement levels to get equally noted for posterity. - The long-term prominence of Elvis Presley rivals that of the most famous classical composers. Roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news! Along the way, the authors present the rankings of more than one thousand of history's most significant people in science, politics, entertainment, and all areas of human endeavor. Anyone interested in history or biography can see where their favorite figures place in the grand scheme of things. While revisiting old historical friends and making new ones, you will come to understand the forces that shape historical recognition in a whole new light.

Who's Bigger?: Where Historical Figures Really Rank

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Product Details

Hardcover: 391 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (October 14, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1107041376
ISBN-13: 978-1107041370
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #958,928 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #404 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Reference & Collections
- #790 in Books > History > Historical Study & Educational Resources > Historiography
- #3778 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > History > Europe

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful

This book is astounding and outstanding.

By Daniel A. Ray on December 10, 2013

Format: Hardcover

I've read the hand full of negative reviews, and it seems clear that the problem people have with this book is that they are expecting something very different from what this book is. It is NOT a history book. It is NOT a book which claims to rank individuals based on some artificial metric (the authors leave that squarely on the "capable" shoulders of many a humanities scholar, and it is not attempting to do ANYTHING besides take an objective, mathematically grounded survey of one particular (very unique and very popular) resource, using newly developed algorithmic techniques. You may disagree with the results in one of two ways. First, you can disagree with the people on the list and have your own favorites. Good for you, you are free to argue however you like about how great a particular individual is in your life or based on your personal metrics, but this is beside the point of this book. You can also argue that the algorithms used are flawed; but you will ALSO equally have to argue that the proof that the authors offer that their algorithms are properly aligned is flawed; a difficult task I believe.

When you read this book, if you remove yourself from your expectations and biases, you will see that the list is more or less the secondary result of the work presented in this book. The real reason why this book is great is that it represents a fascinating intersection of analytics and the humanities (think sabermetrics or the successes of Nate Silver, but better). It provides a unique tool for parsing huge sets of data, impartial in its very nature, whose implications are just BEGINNING to be explored. It is a brand new lens for exploring; from how textbooks are written, to how halls of fame are filled and what that means about who we are.Read more ›

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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

Very good book -- if you actually read it

By Arnout van de Rijt on December 10, 2013

Format: Hardcover

Skiena and Ward are first-class scientists. If you don't read the actual book you can make up a lot to dislike about it. For example, you could cherry-pick some rankings of historical figures that strike you as exhibiting extreme bias of some sort, ignore the authors' qualifications of their data, and pretend like this is a naive book. You could also read the book, find that the authors are very much aware of the limitations of their data and discover that instead they use the usable parts of it in clever ways to provide interesting insights. I recommend you do the latter.

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10 of 13 people found the following review helpful

A fascinating application of mathematics to history

By Amazon Customer on November 1, 2013

Format: Hardcover

If you like history you should read this book. If you like mathematics you should read this book. If you like baseball you should read this book. If you simply like to argue you should read this book. With rankings of individual's historical significance in areas ranging from religion and philosophy, literature, popular music, science and technology to dictators and despots, there's something in this well-written, entertaining, and informative book to appeal to just about any interest you may have. Plenty of charts and graphs make it accessible even to people who don't enjoy reading.

You will certainly disagree strongly with some of the rankings. Winston Churchill only the 37th most significant historical figure? I think not. Robert Peel the most significant figure born on my birthday? I hope not. But such disagreements enhance the enjoyment of the book, not distract from it.

Educators and parents may be especially interested in Chapter 3: Who Belongs in Bonnie's Textbook? This chapter considers the historical significance of people appearing in a fifth grade U.S. history text, and finds a disproportionate number of people with weak significance present. As the author's write, "Do we believe Bonnie's textbook should be populated only by figures of the highest significance rank? Of course not. But we do feel that the large-scale presence of historical figures of weak significance in elementary school textbooks is a phenomenon worth questioning."

(full disclosure: I've known the first author since first year at the University of Virginia in 1979, and I reviewed an early version of the manuscript. Neither of these facts would cause me to rate this book highly if I didn't really enjoy it.)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

What can quantitative methods contribute to historiography?

By Charlie Johnson on January 18, 2014

Format: Hardcover

Entertaining, provocative, fresh. Who's Bigger? contains the results of and commentary on a computer algorithm that used source data from Wikipedia and Google to rank the most significant historical figures. Beside the list itself, the book has two main sections. Roughly the first half of the book explains the development, meaning, and value of the list. It also looks at other ways that people have tried to create a canon of historical figures (history books, halls of fame, etc.) and compares them with the list. The second half of the book breaks the list into various categories of people (US Presidents, world leaders, artists, etc.) to show how the ranking data can be used to tell certain kinds of historical narratives. One creative chapter told the story of recorded history by dividing each century into five 20-year blocks and focusing on the most significant person born in that block.

It would be easy to take the details of the list too seriously, e.g., this person should be #12, not #9, or Aristotle before Plato? However, I think the greater danger lies in not taking the authors' achievement seriously enough. One thing history provides people is calibration. It is only through history that we realize that things such as democracy, Western dominance, universal education, and effective medical treatment are not given by nature but the outcomes of contingent processes, outcomes that distinguish the present from the majority of history. History also takes the individual out of his or her corner of the world, enriching his or her canon of significant figures through contact with those of other civilizations. I believe this book can be a tool for calibrating one's historical sense. One chapter uses the list to critique one of the authors' daughter's fifth grade history textbook.Read more ›

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

maybe my # 1 favourite book of all-time?

this is EXACTLY what i wanted.... mini-bios on the 1000 most famous people (the authors' guidelines, which is fine).........

Published 13 months ago by L. donsor

This book is about an Algorithm; not Historical Significance

The algorithm the authors use to measure “historical significance” uses on-line documentation particularly Wikipedia, it compensates for temporal effects on reputation, it takes... Read more

Published 17 months ago by Thomas Wikman

"Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics"

As one of those folks who are fascinated with reading and comparing listings and rankings of various people, companies, political trends. Read more

Published 20 months ago by James R. Holland

Great book if you love lists

Who's Bigger is one of those books for people who love lists. The authors use an algorithm of several factors to determine who is bigger and these lists are very interesting. Read more

Published 20 months ago by Melissa

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

The review title is one of my favorite quotes, by George Box. It really suits this book. The writers have applied significant quantitative rigor in order to answer the age-old... Read more

Published 21 months ago by Todd Justman

Much ado about...metrics

This book proclaims itself to be a new way of determining the relative importance of historical figures. Read more

Published 21 months ago by Joseph Devita

great book but niche interest

this is an interesting book presenting an interesting approach to studying history. my only caveat is that you probably need to be very interested in math and math models to enjoy... Read more

Published 21 months ago by The Tao of Netflix

Books like these start arguments, but rarely finish them.

Who is bigger, or as the authors eventually point out, who is more significant in history? The authors attempt to answer this question using what they would call Quantitative... Read more

Published 21 months ago by A. Debban

It's OK, but . . .

I looked through this book, and found the numbers interesting.

The numbers are based on hits on Wikipedia and Google. Read more

Published 22 months ago by Amazon Customer

Strangely fascinating

This book is more about the process of ranking historical figures than it is about the figures. Keep that in mind: this is not a stack of mini-biographies. Instead, Who's Bigger? Read more

Published 22 months ago by Doug Hibbard

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