What's the most common name in America?

The first and most important reason this is wrong is that basic demographic facts tie certain first and last names together. We know that surnames aren’t equally distributed among Americans because the Census Bureau publishes those surnames with a breakdown by racial and ethnic group. It shows that in 2000, 99.9 percent of Americans with the surname “Heimerl” were white, and 99.0 percent with the surname “Rezendiz” were Hispanic.

Those facts affect first names, too. Intuitively, you probably think that there are a lot more Americans called “Maria Martinez” than “Maria Miller.” Last year, Lee Hartman, an associate professor emeritus of Spanish at Southern Illinois University, tried to test that intuition. Hartman had a simple idea: Look up first- and last-name combinations on the White Pages website and see whether simple probabilities captured reality. He found those basic probabilities were way off the mark.

Hartman didn’t choose the top names for his table using SSA and census records, so it looks a little different from ours. But it does show just how strong those racial and ethnic factors are.