Skiena and Ward are not interested only in what happens to specific people but also in the possibility of making general predictions about likely changes over time, and thus translating their “fame” measure into one of “significance.” It turns out that famous people tend to be most discussed about sixty or seventy years after they are born, and that there is a decline from that point—but that with the most famous people, discussion is reduced later in life, and also more slowly. (Jesus is the extreme case here.) The resulting statistical model allows them to make adjustments from current fame and thus to compute not only total significance rankings (producing the top-twenty list replicated above) but also rankings within fields.

The five most significant presidents? Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ulysses S. Grant. Military leaders? Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, and Oliver Cromwell. The most significant economists? Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Malthus, John Maynard Keynes, and David Ricardo. Literary figures? Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Voltaire. Novelists (before 1900)? Dickens, Twain, Oscar Wilde, Goethe, and Lewis Carroll. Rock-and-roll hall-of-famers? Elvis Presley, Madonna, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Michael Jackson. Actresses? Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, and Marlene Dietrich. Television stars? Lucille Ball, Hilary Duff, Stephen Colbert, Roger Ebert, and Jennifer Aniston.