An interactive map tells you the answer: Sean Connery in Edinburgh, Barack Obama in Honolulu, Freddie Mercury in Zanzibar. Who can guess Budapest?
University of Paris researchers have developed an incredible interactive map, which, based on Wikipedia and Wikipedia data, tells you which city has the most important indigenous population. The map is the brainchild of Toby Zhukanov, a researcher and geographer at Mapbox, whose study was published in Nature in June.
The goal is to build a more comprehensive and accurate database of famous people, said Morgan Lawinan, head of the research group. For the wiki data collected, the quantity and length of entries, the average number of views per person (between 2015 and 2018), and the total amount of external links were also monitored. This is how they got the most important personalities in the cities of the world.
Users can view the most important people in the city that they care about in four categories: culture, science, politics, and sports. But we can also select the “All” group, which will reveal the most important person.
In many places, the results exceeded our expectations, for example, in the British capital, the most important person born in London was not a member of the royal family, but Charlie Chaplin. We can note the diversity of celebrities if we look at the scores of several English cities: Roald Dahl is Cardiff’s top, Mel B represents Leeds, Oscar Wilde represents Dublin, Judi Dench represents York, but it’s also worth taking a look at the USA: In Texas, it ranked Selena Gomez, Tommy Lee Jones, and Beyoncé ranked first, with Ariana Grande, Jim Morrison and Tommy Petty at the top of the list in Florida. Pop stars dominate!
Freud is the winner in the Czech Republic, and Leonardo is the winner in Italy. But not only artists and scientists are among the important names, for example, Hitler represents Austria along with Schwarzenegger, and Nicolae Ceausescu represents Romania.
We can guess the famous Iceland native of course Björk, but in Monaco it is surprising that he is not a famous royal, but Rafael Nadal is the most important, just as it is a surprise in our country that Béla Bartók, not Puskás, is in the lead.
(Cover image: Freddie Mercury in 1982. Photo: Steve Jennings/WireImage/Getty Images)
