Who's Bigger?: Where Historical Figures Really Rank
"Skiena and Ward provide a numerical ranking for the every Wikipedia resident who's ever lived. What a great idea! This book is a guaranteed argument-starter. I found something to argue with on nearly every page."Andrew Gelman, author of Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do"Absolutely groundbreaking: the first fullscale, data driven undertaking to weigh the historical and cultural impact of persons. This work injects a much needed dose of quantitative rigor into the field of history itself. How do the greatest legacies of yesteryear stack up, not only against one another, but against the power of today's celebrity royalty? This thorough treatment illuminates, validates, and even augments history as a discipline."Eric Siegel, PhD, founder, Predictive Analytics World and author, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die"This is all fun: reputational face-offs are great entertainment. And, shrewdly, Skiena and Ward have an app. More seriously, historians will put quantitative analysis to good use - and their model may help historiographers grapple with Wikipedia."New Scientist"I confess to simply liking the book. I still do not care about the great order of things; nonetheless, I very much appreciate a huge amount of fascinating detail that the book makes available at one's fingertips, and the orderly manner in which it does that."Alex Bogomolny, MAA Reviews"... the authors' enthusiasm and sense of play are infectious."Cass Sunstein, The New Republic