Websites and Databases

We hope that some readers will be inspired by this book to perform further investigations into historical significance. We encourage you to visit our website at http://www.whoisbigger.com, where you can access our latest analysis for more than 800,000 different people. These rankings will be updated to reflect more recent editions of Wikipedia, including those of languages beyond English.

This website is still under active development, so you will have to visit to see exactly what information we present on each individual. But at the time of this writing, we include rosters of people with comparable significance, celebrity, and gravitas, to help you put their achievements into perspective.

We also provide an interface to rank individuals within hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia categories, so you can see how they stack up in comparison with their peers.

We also encourage the reader to check out the Google books Ngram viewer, which Google makes available at http://books. google.com/ngrams. Although we have developed our own Ngram visualizations, which we make available at http://www.whois bigger.com, the Google site has far more comprehensive data. This includes more general vocabularies, annotation by parts of speech, and even Ngrams in multiple languages. It is a fabulous resource to explore.

Birth/Death Calendars

In Section 7.2 of Chapter 7, we showed that life outcomes can be affected (at least to a minor extent) by the specifics of one's calendar birth date. It is natural to be curious about the historical figures which share your birth date: perhaps this kinship may reflect something of our own prospects for the future.