When Betty White died, someone pointed out that Henry Kissinger is now the oldest famous person. Before Betty White, I think it was Beverly Cleary. Who was the oldest famous person before that? I don’t know, but we should be able to put together a string of them, going back in time to the dawn of history.
Someone with good programming chops could take a first crack at this by scraping Wikipedia, I guess.
Yes, I understand that “famous person” is not precisely defined, lots of people outside the U.S. have never heard of various people, etc. I get it. It’s still an interesting question to me, for some reason.
P.S. I was gonna put this one on 6-month delay, but who knows how long the famous socialite / war criminal (as Spy called him) will stay alive? So safest to just get it out there right away.
P.P.S. When I say “famous,” I mean famous famous, not just someone who happened to live to 100 and had an interesting enough life to get a NYT obituary.
P.P.P.S. Lots of good stuff in comments. Mike Jacovides reminds us that Norman Lear is still alive! I should’ve thought of Norman Lear. My dad knew him in high school. Not well, but a bit. According to my dad, Lear acted like he was a bigshot and went around calling himself King Lear. He’s not as famous as Henry Kissinger but he’s older, so I guess they’re both on the efficient frontier.
Also Al Jaffee and Roger Angell! Both these names are very familiar to me, but I guess they’re not famous famous. Not in the Beverly Cleary or Betty White zone.
Michael Lugo writes, “Prince Philip (born June 10, 1921) may have been the world’s oldest famous person between Cleary’s death (March 25, 2021) and his own (April 9, 2021).”
P.P.P.P.S. More here.
Would Aaron Beck have counted as famous? He died at age 100 in November.
“Calling Margalit Fox” (former NYT obituary editor)
Norman Lear is still alive and is ten months older than Kissinger. (Al Jaffee and Roger Angell are also older and still alive, but less famous.)
Al Jaffee and Rogel Angell are dead now. It may be that only Norman Lear is keeping Kissinger from being the oldest famous person
Mike:
That’s sad about Al Jaffee! I mean, ok, I guess it’s not so sad—he lived to 102 which is already a triumph. Still, if I were 102, I think I’d like to live to at least 103.
Also, I hadn’t realized that he wrote Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. The wonderful obituary by Neil Genzlinger supplied an example:
Is Kane Tanaka “famous famous”?
I feel like being famous just for being old shouldn’t really count.
Albeit a morbid hobby, the Deathlist (https://deathlist.net/) looks like a semi-authorative reference. Kissinger is not only the oldest on the list, but also the runners-up in terms of “popularity”…
Olivia de Havilland?
Jonathan:
Nope. According to Wikipedia, she was born later and died sooner than Beverly Cleary.
I don’t think Sir David Cox is far from the top of this list..
and CR Rao!
Unfortunately he’s no longer on the list: https://rss.org.uk/news-publication/news-publications/2022/general-news/sir-david-cox-1924-2022/
U.S. person here! I’ve never heard of Beverly Cleary
Peter:
It’s not too late for you to read Beezus and Ramona!
I would argue that the oldest person in the world is always the oldest famous person. The two oldest living people in the world both have wikipedia pages, and only due to their status as oldest people.
Peter:
“Having a wikipedia page” isn’t enough. I’m talking bigger fame than that. Jeanne Calment was famous at the level I’m talking about, but I wouldn’t say that anyone else is at that level of fame, just for being old.
Alternatively, who’s the most famous old person? In the original, fame is binary and age is continuous, but in the alternative, age is binary but fame is continuous.
What if we treat both as continuous, e.g. who maximizes the product Age * Fame? I feel like fame is much heavier-tailed than age, so you’d end up with somebody who’s more “famous” than “old”, like Kanye or Trump, if you just went by “age” * “appropriately identifying google search results”. Maybe fame is like log-normal or power-law distributed, and we should be log-transforming it first or something?
I like this response.
Yah, seems to me that without further specifications as to scales, this is a pretty tough question to answer.
For example, Trump is about 2/3 as old as the world’s oldest person but maybe 10? Million times more famous?
It wouldn’t make sense to use a multiplicative scale. For example, 108 is only 20% more than 90, but it’s a lot more than 10% more impressive (whatever that means) to reach 108 years of age than to reach 90.
You might think that some sort of percentile thing would work, but I think that could have other problems.
This is similar to our discussion of Turing’s round-the-house chess: what kind of combination are you looking for?
Make a graph. The x axis age in years; the y axis fame as a percentage of the people who recognize a photo of the purported famous person. Both axis go from 0 to 100. A 45 degree line segregates the famous/not old and the old/not famous. The sweet spot is in the middle.
How about recognize the name rather than the photo?
But I don’t understand what is sweet about 50 years old and 50% recognition. I was going to say 100 years old and 100% recognition is pretty sweet, but though I want to live to 100 I don’t want to be 100 right now. Personally, I might go for 30,30 rather than 50,50, but I can sort of see your reasoning. Actually this might be a very interesting survey question.
Dale:
100% face recognition sounds pretty horrible! I wouldn’t even want 1%. I mean, sure, 100% at work would be great, but I want something more like 0.1% on the street. Every once in awhile I’m recognized by a complete stranger on the street, and that’s kinda cool, but I wouldn’t want it to happen every day.
I did say I prefer name recognition to face recognition. But, more importantly, and related to the very lengthy discussion last week, my preferences for age and recognition are lexicographic – I’ll take more age and only consider recognition for equal ages.
Dale:
But not really lexicographic! For example, you’d give up 1 minute of life for another 20 percentage points of name recognition, right?
not sure about the 1 minute vs 20% recognition. I guess we need to bring in another dimension – quality – both for the minute and for the recognition.
Norman Lear (born July 27, 1922) is still alive, and older than Kissinger (May 27, 1923) but younger than White (January 17, 1922).
Prince Philip (born June 10, 1921) may have been the world’s oldest famous person between Cleary’s death (March 25, 2021) and his own (April 9, 2021).
That was my thought too. Pity he did not make it to get that letter from his wife.
I had to google to find out who Beverly Clearly was but I have never lived in the USA.
Widening the aperture out a bit to the most famous people throughout human history, MITs Pantheon project has just such metrics.
https://pantheon.world/
Two oldest famous persons go together. Henry Kissinger is 98 and Tom Lehrer is 93. Recall that Lehrer once said that satire died when Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. See
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/top-10-nobel-peace-prize-embarrassments
for additional Nobel Peace Prize embarrassments. Because the just-mentioned website dates from 2017, it does not include Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed the 2019 winner.
Jimmy Carter (b. 1 October 1924) is not far behind Kissinger.
To find who is currently the oldest famous person:
1) go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_living_centenarians
2) sort the table by age
3) go down the list of names until you find a famous person
I’d say James Lovelock (26 July 1919), ymmv.
I imagine most people here will also recognize C. R. Rao (10 September 1920).
I’m rooting for Al Jaffee to make it to the top of this list eventually.
I don’t know who Lovelock is. The first one I recognized was “Sister Jean.” But she’s famous for sports fans only. Rao only for statisticians/scientists. I had heard of Ben Ferencz but only because of a tangential connection to my work. I don’t think there is anyone on that list whom more than a third of Americans would recognize. I bet Sister Jean would get the highest number, but that would be like 15% or so?
C. R. Rao died yesterday at 102.
Though I wouldn’t call him “famous”, I wish composer Elliott Carter could make this list. Born in 1908, died in 2012, and while he wrote great music during his middle life, his most productive (and popular, to the extent a modern composer can be) period was after he turned 90, including (according to wikipedia, I wasn’t keeping track) 20 pieces composed after he turned 100.
I learned recently that EB White is Roger Angell’s stepfather.
Some stats might be useful
Queen Elizabeth About 2,940,000,000 results
Betty White About 2,340,000,000 results
Henry Kissenger About 9,650,000 results
Beverly Cleary About 4,020,000 results
Googling with quotes and correct spelling:
“Queen Elizabeth”: 92.2 million
“Betty White”: 108 million
“Henry Kissinger”: 5.58 million
“Beverly Cleary”: 0.97 million
There’s something weird about using this as a measure of fame. For one thing, if you google my name you get 0.25 million hits, and no way I’m 1/4 as famous as Beverly Cleary.
As for the Betty White thing . . . ummmm, I dunno. It seems hard to believe she has anything near the fame of Queen Elizabeth. Maybe the number is inflated because there were lots of stories about her after she died. “Jesus Christ” only gets 131 million hits, and he’s a lot more than 21% more famous than Betty White!
This is clearly not a good measure. I am 37, not from the US and I’ve never heard of Betty White until this year (and would not recognize her, and I know many, many American actors).
As one measure of popularity outside of the US, one could use the number of Wikipedia pages about a person in different languages – for Betty White it’s about 60, for Elizabeth II it’s about 180.
Sadly, Sir David Cox died on Jan 18, 2022, as I’m sure everyone here knows.
Surely as of October 2024 the answer is Jimmy Carter.
The answer is no longer Jimmy Carter, since he died in December 2024. Dick van Dyke was born December 13, 1925 and is definitely a candidate for the current answer.
While not as famous as Dick van Dyke, Eva Marie Saint is 101.
Alan Greenspan is 100 and Mel Brooks will turn 100 in a few months. Buzz Aldrin, Noam Chomsky and Clint Eastwood, among others, are in their late 90’s