Who’s the most famous Finn?
p2pnet.net News:- Who’s the most famous Finn in the world?
Jean Sibelius?
Nope.
Pamela Anderson, maybe?
Nope.
It’s Linux inventor Linus Torvalds, says the Helsingin Sanomat, to no one’s surprise.
The names of around 160 famous Finns, alive and dead, were Googled and, "to increase the accuracy still further, the names were entered in quotation marks, meaning ‘the exact phrase’ was being sought (otherwise a simple search on Jorma Ollila, for example, would give you all the Jormas and all the Ollilas lumped together)," says Anssi Miettinen, continuing:
"Writing the name as ‘Jorma Ollila’ also limited the myriad entries of scientists and researchers, who would otherwise have dominated the lists because of their presence as source references in research papers. In most cases these are entered in the format ‘Surname, Firstname’.
"The problem of Finland’s Äs, Ös, and Ås was overcome by adding together the ‘correct’ spelling and the Anglicised forms, so that we searched for instance both on Kimi Räikkönen and his alter ego Kimi Raikkonen, and then we took the sum."
The other nine Most Famous Finns were:
2. Kimi Räikkönen/Raikkonen (Formula One driver) 401,000
3. Darude (musician) 252,000
4. Mika Häkkinen/Hakkinen (former F1 driver and World Champion) 214,400
5. Jean Sibelius (composer) 180,000
6. Renny Harlin (film director) 150,000
7. Ville Valo (HIM vocalist) 147,000
8. Alvar Aalto (architect) 139,000
9. Tarja Halonen (President) 121,000
10. Erkki Liikanen (Governor, Bank of Finland; ex-EU Commissioner) 120,000
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See:-
Helsingin Sanomat – Google, Google on the screen, who’s the most famous Finn there’s ever been?, May 23, 2005
