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

by Steven Skiena (Author), Charles B. Ward (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 29 ratings
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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.
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  1. ISBN-10
    1107041376
  2. ISBN-13
    978-1107041370
  3. Edition
    Illustrated
  4. Publisher
    Cambridge University Press
  5. Publication date
    October 14, 2013
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
  8. Print length
    391 pages
  9. See all details
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Amazon First Reads | Editors' picks at exclusive prices

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Skiena and Ward provide a numerical ranking for the every Wikipedia resident who's ever lived. What a great idea! This book is a guaranteed argument-starter. I found something to argue with on nearly every page."
Andrew Gelman, author of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do

"Absolutely groundbreaking: the first fullscale, data driven undertaking to weigh the historical and cultural impact of persons. This work injects a much needed dose of quantitative rigor into the field of history itself. How do the greatest legacies of yesteryear stack up, not only against one another, but against the power of today's celebrity royalty? This thorough treatment illuminates, validates, and even augments history as a discipline."
Eric Siegel, PhD, founder, Predictive Analytics World and author, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

"This is all fun: reputational face-offs are great entertainment. And, shrewdly, Skiena and Ward have an app. More seriously, historians will put quantitative analysis to good use - and their model may help historiographers grapple with Wikipedia."
New Scientist

"I confess to simply liking the book. I still do not care about the great order of things; nonetheless, I very much appreciate a huge amount of fascinating detail that the book makes available at one’s fingertips, and the orderly manner in which it does that."
Alex Bogomolny, MAA Reviews

"… the authors' enthusiasm and sense of play are infectious."
Cass Sunstein, The New Republic

Book Description

Data-driven rankings of thousands of history's most significant people in science, politics, entertainment, and all areas of human endeavor.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press; Illustrated edition (October 14, 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 391 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1107041376
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1107041370
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.5 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 29 ratings

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  1. Steve Skiena

    Steve Skiena

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    Steven S. Skiena is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. He is the author of six well-regarded books: The Algorithm Design Manual (2020), The Data Science Design Manual (2017), Who's Bigger (2013), Calculated Bets: Computers, Gambling, and Mathematical Modeling to Win (2001), Programming Challenges (with Miguel Revilla, 2003) and Computational Discrete Mathematics (with Sriram Pemmaraju, 2003).

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  2. Charles Ward

    Charles Ward

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Customer reviews

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29 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

John
5.0 out of 5 stars Groundbreaking
Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2014
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This book opens a most fascinating new perspective on history. At first dubious as to the premise of this book, I was nonetheless compelled by its depth. Viewing history is not a mathematical pursuit, yet I find it very difficult to argue against in depth statistical insight such as that presented here.
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FBTR
4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating! Recommended.
Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2013
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This is a fascinating book with an extremely interesting concept. The authors use the incredible power of the internet, Wikipedia, and Google's Ngrams to create a mathematical rating system (significance) for people, both current and historical. They then use these data to compare people in many areas, professions, and times.

They explain their processes and calculation very well and then provide comparisons with "experts" and "Top 100" lists, etc. to validate that what they measure is actually doing the job. Then they delve into literally scores of categories to compare the most significant figures. Was Thomas Edison more significant than Alexander Graham Bell or Eli Whitney? Who was the most significant world leader between the world wars? Which King or Pope had the most long-term significance?

They do admit that the data in Anglo-centric, all of the data is in English, and they have made a correction for recency. All in all it is fascinating to wander through their tables and graphs and see where my personal favorites fell.

One criticism I have is that there is really too much data and too many categories and too many comparisons. It would have been better to focus in more depth on fewer categories and dive deeper into the data, leaving the more esoteric areas to another volume or to the internet (they have a very nice companion website).

For everyone interested in history and interested in numerical comparisons (for any area - baseball, business, the arts, etc.) the book is highly recommended.
6 people found this helpful
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Daniel A. Ray
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is astounding and outstanding.
Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2013
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.

Is it all things to all men? No. Is it biased toward the Englsh language? Decidedly and self-admittedly, but also inconsequentially, because it invites further study and entices further such pursuits. Is the list holy and sacrosanct, or even REALLY the point of the book? Again, no.

The results are the results, and the list is the list, and if the list challenges you or is lacking in some way, then it's because those shortcomings are the mere reflections of societies shortcomings (again, admittedly; the list reveals that women have to do comparatively more, historically, to reach equal significance), and the bulk of the book is about exploring what the list means about us.
15 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Toby Pereira
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting book, but too much American bias
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 21, 2014
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I think this is a very interesting book, and it was interesting to read how they came up with their algorithm to measure the significance of historical figures. Obviously I don't agree with every ranking, but I think it does a good job overall, and it's impressive to be able to come up with an algorithm to do this.

The biggest problem I have with the book is the bias towards American figures. The authors acknowledge that the English Wikipedia (their main source of information) is biased towards American figures, but I don't think they really acknowledge the extent of it, and the text of the book is very American-biased as well. There are several chapters devoted to how their system ranks American figures in certain fields, ignoring the rest of the world, and it does very little to dispel the stereotype that Americans think that America is the world.

On the ranking bias, it doesn't seem to take into account how much America has increased as a power over the centuries. It would make sense for twentieth century American presidents to feature more highly in the rankings than older presidents because of America's position in the world. But it seems to view it from an entirely American viewpoint and presidents seem to be ranked in terms of their significance to America.

For example, it has Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as 5th, 6th and 10th respectively, which I would say overstates their world significance - three of the ten most significant people ever are pre-20th century American presidents according to them. Ulysses Grant is 28th despite having very little resonance outside America, whereas more recent presidents have had more of a global effect and aren't ranked as highly. If another country came to prominence as a world power in the future, would that make their past leaders retrospectively more significant? I would argue not to this extent. I would suggest that the American bias is also why Einstein (19th), who was based in America, is rated as more significant than Newton (21st).

But there are some very interesting discussions and comparisons of many significant figures of the world, and I do think that this book is for the most part an interesting read. I don't think anyone will read it and not find a lot to disagree with, but I don't think anyone could produce a list that wouldn't have this effect. But it does have Napoleon as the second most significant person ever. And he wasn't even American.
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