HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016999.jpg

“In the Future, Everyone Will Be World Famous for 7.5 Minutes” –Whatshisname
People, too, rise to prominence, only to be forgotten (22).
Fame can be tracked by measuring the frequency of a person’s name (Fig. 3C). We compared the rise to fame of the most famous people of different eras. We took all 740,000 people with entries in Wikipedia, removed cases where several famous individuals share a name, and sorted the rest by birthdate and frequency (23). For every year from 1800-1950, we constructed a cohort consisting of the fifty most famous people born in that year. For example, the 1882 cohort includes “Virginia Woolf” and “Felix Frankfurter”; the 1946 cohort includes “Bill Clinton” and “Steven Spielberg.” We plotted the median frequency for the names in each cohort over time (Fig. 3D-E). The resulting trajectories were all similar. Each cohort had a pre-celebrity period ( median frequency <10⁻⁹), followed by a rapid rise to prominence, a peak, and a slow decline. We therefore characterized each cohort using four parameters: (i) the age of initial celebrity; (ii) the doubling time of the initial rise; (iii) the age of peak celebrity; (iv) the half-life of the decline (Fig. 3E). The age of peak celebrity has been consistent over time: about 75 years after birth. But the other parameters have been changing. Fame comes sooner and rises faster: between the early 19th century and the mid-20th century, the age of initial celebrity declined from 43 to 29 years, and the doubling time fell from 8.1 to 3.3 years. As a result, the most famous people alive today are more famous – in books – than their predecessors. Yet this fame is increasingly short-lived: the post-peak half-life dropped from 120 to 71 years during the nineteenth century.
We repeated this analysis with all 42,358 people in the databases of Encyclopaedia Britannica (24), which reflect a process of expert curation that began in 1768. The results were similar (7). Thus, people are getting more famous than ever before, but are being forgotten more rapidly than ever.
Occupational choices affect the rise to fame. We focused on the 25 most famous individuals born between 1800 and 1920 in seven occupations (actors, artists, writers, politicians, biologists, physicists, and mathematicians), examining how their fame grew as a function of age (Fig. 3F).
Actors tend to become famous earliest, at around 30. But the fame of the actors we studied – whose ascent preceded the spread of television – rises slowly thereafter. (Their fame peaked at a frequency of 2x10⁻⁷.) The writers became famous about a decade after the actors, but rose for longer and to a much higher peak (8x10⁻⁷). Politicians did not become famous until their 50s, when, upon being elected President of the United States (in 11 of 25 cases; 9 more were heads of other states) they rapidly rose to become the most famous of the groups (1x10⁻⁶).

Science is a poor route to fame. Physicists and biologists eventually reached a similar level of fame as actors (1x10⁻⁷), but it took them far longer. Alas, even at their peak, mathematicians tend not to be appreciated by the public (2x10⁻⁸).
Detecting Censorship and Suppression
Suppression – of a person, or an idea – leaves quantifiable fingerprints (25). For instance, Nazi censorship of the Jewish artist Marc Chagall is evident by comparing the frequency of “Marc Chagall” in English and in German books (Fig.4A). In both languages, there is a rapid ascent starting in the late 1910s (when Chagall was in his early 30s). In English, the ascent continues. But in German, the artist’s popularity decreases, reaching a nadir from 1936-1944, when his full name appears only once. (In contrast, from 1946-1954, “Marc Chagall” appears nearly 100 times in the German corpus.) Such examples are found in many countries, including Russia (e.g. Trotsky), China (Tiananmen Square) and the US (the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted in 1947) (Fig.4B-D).
We probed the impact of censorship on a person’s cultural influence in Nazi Germany. Led by such figures as the librarian Wolfgang Hermann, the Nazis created lists of authors and artists whose “undesirable”, “degenerate” work was banned from libraries and museums and publicly burned (26-28). We plotted median usage in German for five such lists: artists (100 names), as well as writers of Literature (147), Politics (117), History (53), and Philosophy (35) (Fig 4E). We also included a collection of Nazi party members [547 names, ref (7)]. The five suppressed groups exhibited a decline. This decline was modest for writers of history (9%) and literature (27%), but pronounced in politics (60%), philosophy (76%), and art (56%). The only group whose signal increased during the Third Reich was the Nazi party members [a 500% increase; ref (7)].
Given such strong signals, we tested whether one could identify victims of Nazi repression de novo. We computed a “suppression index” s for each person by dividing their frequency from 1933 – 1945 by the mean frequency in 1925-1933 and in 1955-1965 (Fig.4F, Inset). In English, the distribution of suppression indices is tightly centered around unity. Fewer than 1% of individuals lie at the extremes (s<1/5 or s>5).
In German, the distribution in much wider, and skewed leftward: suppression in Nazi Germany was not the exception, but the rule (Fig. 4F). At the far left, 9.8% of individuals showed strong suppression (s<1/5). This population is highly enriched for documented victims of repression, such as Pablo Picasso (s=0.12), the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius (s=0.16), and Hermann Maas (s<.01), an influential Protestant Minister who helped many Jews flee (7). (Maas was later recognized by Israel’s Yad Vashem as a “Righteous Among the Nations.”) At the other

Sciencexpress / www.sciencexpress.org / 16 December 2010 / Page 4 / 10.1126/science.1199644
Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on December 16, 2010
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016999