JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 859 Blog Bookstore
Some time ago—for reasons not clearly remembered—I looked up
prominent names in the history of science in a national (perhaps) telephone
database for their frequency of occurrence.
It tells me nothing, really, but it was sort of interesting to see the
meaningless results. The first number is
for the number of people with telephones with that surname; the second is for
its rank (though I have no idea what the last/bottom number was).
Einstein:
2,751/27,842
Dirac: 6/489,377
Bohr: 577/14490
Tesla: 58/100,064
Born: 2284/4,422
Rutherford: 8,759/1124
Planck: 338/23.480
Feynman: 4/614,750
Oppenheimer: 856/10,746
Schwinger: 50/70,178
Wheeler: 39,000/206
Maxwell: 20,700/428
Galileo: 3/712,622
Heisenberg: 5,
550,000
And so there you have it. Now that I've posted it I can throw the scrap of paper away.
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