PageRanking the World’s Most Influential Thinkers
PageRank has been frequently discussed in class as one of the world’s most well-known algorithms for ranking webpages by their relevance. Although we have mostly discussed PageRank in the context of Google’s search algorithm, it turns out that PageRank can be generalized and applied to other queries as well. Karin Frick, a researcher at the GDI Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute in Switzerland, spearheaded an effort to rank well known philosophers and thinkers by their ability to influence the world.
In order to apply a PageRank search, there must be an initial repository of “information” for the search to be applied upon. To get this seed, Frick worked with fifty leading thought leaders to select 100 famous thinkers known for their work in philosophy, sociology, economics, and the hard sciences. Frick then assumed that a direct correlation between their ideas and the importance of those ideas could be linked to influential and well-known blogs that described those thinkers’ ideas. With the premise that the most influential thinkers are those that are linked back to by other thinkers on the blog, Frick constructed a list of these most influential thinkers.
Surprisingly, the top few thinkers were filled with specialist thinkers, who were generally unknown to those outside of their fields such as Richard Florida, Thilo Sarrazin, and Daniel Kahneman. Some interesting patterns that can be drawn from this list is that a majority of the leading thinkers were economists, which were followed up by political theory, then biologists, then physicists.
Admittedly, there are likely to be many hidden variables influencing the outcome of this specific experiment, such as the credibility of blogs and non-technological influential channels, to mention a few. However, this application of PageRank is an interesting and novel one, and I recommend giving this article a read:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/518026/network-analysis-reveals-worlds-most-influential-thinkers/