I've just been surveying this fascinating roster of the most famous scientists, living and dead, based upon name mentions in Google Books. Darwin is the most famous, so all others are ranked in units called milli-Darwins (mD)--it takes a thousand of them to equal a Darwin. I was somewhat surprised to learn, first of all, that Einstein only gets 878 milli-Darwins. I would have thought, instinctively, that he's still more famous, although I agree Darwin has been surging over the past few decades. Having a Nobel prize does not seem particularly well correlated with fame in this analysis. And as for the late, great popular science writers of the last generation? Well, it seems they're much more famous than most Nobelists. In terms of rank, it goes Asimov (183 mD), Gould (169 mD), and then Sagan (152 mD). The latter is tied with Rachel Carson (152 mD), who is the second highest woman on the list after Marie Curie (189 mD). I do have a lot of questions about this method. Because it relies upon name appearance in books, it seems likely to diverge greatly from how today's pop culture awareness would rate famous scientists. There are a number of figures in the top 10, for instance, that I've barely heard of myself (Oliver Lodge, 394 mD, Karl Pearson, 346 mD). Still, quite a fascinating little exercise.
