internet declared Jesus Christ as the most famous person

Jesus Christ was at the number one spot, followed by Napoleon, then Mohammed, according to the Independent newspaper reported. Lincoln was closely followed by George Washington, who was sixth, one place ahead of Adolf Hitler.

The study was carried out by Steven Skiena and Charles Ward. The researchers ranked individuals by looking at data sources, just as the Google Internet search engine looks at Web sources.

Current U.S. President Barack Obama came 111th, 10 places ahead of Madonna. Bob Dylan was 130th. Pop star Justin Bieber finished in 8,633rd.

"The significance of Jesus is shown by his mindshare today fully 2,000 years after his death. We don't see the same happening for Justin Bieber," Skiena says.

The findings are shared in Skiena and Ward's book, "Who's Bigger? Where Historical Figures Really Rank." Both note that there are no female historical figures in the top ten.

Skiena, a professor of computer science at Stony Brook University, New York, said each historical figure was ranked by "aggregating the traces of millions of opinions in a rigorous and principled manner.

"We analyze the Wikipedia pages of over 800,000 people to measure quantities that should correspond to historical significance. We would expect that more significant people should have longer Wikipedia pages than less notable folk, because they have greater accomplishments to report.

"The Wikipedia pages of people of higher significance should attract greater readership than those of lower significance. The elite should have pages linked to by other highly significant figures, meaning they should have a high PageRank, the measure of importance used by Google to identify important web pages," Skiena notes.

The Top Ten, by their findings, were:

1. Jesus

2. Napoleon

3. William Shakespeare

4. Mohammad

5. Abraham Lincoln

6. George Washington

7. Adolf Hitler

8. Aristotle

9. Alexander the Great

10. Thomas Jefferson