There are many varieties of fame. Jesus Christ was the first person to achieve it globally, Clive James wrote, \u201cwithout conquering the world by violence.\u201d\u009d The best kind for a poet to earn, W. H. Auden said, is like some valley cheese \u201d\u201d \u201clocal, but prized elsewhere.\u201d\u009d Yet if all fame, like all politics, is to some degree local, how thoroughly it has been transmitted across the planet and through the centuries has been difficult, if not impossible, to quantify.<\/p>\n
Pantheon, a new project from the Macro Connections group in M.I.T.\u2019s Media Lab, is giving that a stab. It has collected and analyzed data on cultural production from 4,000 B.C. to 2010. With a few clicks on its website, which just went live, you can swing through time and geography, making plain the output of, say, Brazil (largely soccer players) or Belarus (politicians). It also ranks professions from chemists to jurists to porn stars (No. 1 is Jenna Jameson; No. 2 is the Czech Republic\u2019s Silvia Saint).<\/p>\n
For now, you are legitimately famous, the M.I.T. team has decided, if a Wikipedia page under your name exists in more than 25 languages.<\/p>\n