Persons cited in Populscience

Poisson distribution of person names

I enjoy compiling statistics on many things. Naturally, I also do it for this blog. One of the statistics I often compile is that of the names of people (scientists or otherwise) most frequently mentioned in the blog, which now has 564 posts. I presented such a table in January 2024, when 449 articles had been published, in the post titled Ten years of Divulciencia-Populscience, and I think it's time to update it. Here is the corresponding table, showing 40 people who have been mentioned at least 10 times.

Name	Nr. posts	Name	Nr. posts
Albert Einstein	97	Werner Heisenberg	18
Isaac Newton	61	Julio Verne	17
Jesucristo	40	Roger Penrose	17
Charles Darwin	40	Nicolás Copérnico	17
Stephen Hawking	39	Kurt Gödel	16
Aristóteles	34	Arthur Eddington	15
C.S. Lewis	33	H.G. Wells	14
Isaac Asimov	33	Johannes Kepler	13
Arthur C. Clarke	27	Georg Mendel	12
Alan Turing	24	Aldous Huxley	11
Richard Dawkins	23	Niels Bohr	11
Georges Lemaître	22	James Maxwell	11
Galileo Galilei	21	Antoine de Lavoisier	11
Platón	20	Alvin Plantinga	11
Claudio Ptolomeo	20	G.K. Chesterton	11
Max Planck	19	Erwin Schrödinger	10
Enrico Fermi	19	Louis Pasteur	10
Edwin Hubble	19	Poul Anderson	10
Ray Kurzweil	19	Georges Gamow	10
Teilhard de Chardin	18	Stephen Jay Gould	10

How did I get this table? Very simple: In my blog, I searched for each of the names and counted the number of blog posts in the answer. At some point, I thought that this task should be automatable with the tools we have, so I accessed the LLM associated with my blog and asked this question:

Make a table with the names of the people mentioned in all the posts in Diculciencia.blogspot.com and the number of posts in which each one appears, containing people mentioned in at least 5 posts.

After “thinking” for a while, I got this answer:

Based on the posts and extracts from the Divulciencia blog present in the sources…the following people have been identified as mentioned in at least 5 different posts.

Person name	Number of posts
Manuel Alfonseca	20+
Albert Einstein	6
Stephen Hawking	5
Jesus Christ (Christ)	5
Richard Dawkins	5

Details on the count and context:

• Manuel Alfonseca: He appears in almost all of the articles from the sources, either as an author's signature ("Posted by Manuel Alfonseca"), in the headings of blog posts, or as a reference in the introduction to his thematic threads and compilation books.
• Albert Einstein: His mentions are distributed across posts on determinism ("The future is not written"), standard cosmology (in the corresponding thematic thread), his famous "cosmological constant" and its error, the measurement of gravity, and the debate on physical causality.

Et cetera. As you can see, the results aren't promising. Einstein appears 6 times, instead of 97. I suspect this is at least partly because the LLM searched for “Albert Einstein” instead of “Einstein,” which is what I searched for and appears many more times, as the full name appears in 23 posts, considerably more than the 6 it found.

I asked the same question to GEMINI, and it replied:

I'm a text-based AI and can't help you with that.

I asked the same question to ChatGPT, and it replied this:

I can't reliably calculate mentions across all blog posts from here because the site contains hundreds of entries (more than 450 in 2024 and around 550 in 2026), and I don't have the full text of all of them to do a comprehensive count.

However, the author himself published a table with the most cited people in the first 455 posts in Divulciencia. That table contains all the names that appeared at least 10 times (therefore, they also meet the ≥5 occurrences criterion):

And then it showed me the table from my 2024 blog post.

It seems that AI tools are not yet capable of performing simple tasks, like what I asked. The closest one, for obvious reasons, is that associated with the blog itself, but it's very unsatisfactory. And GEMINI gave the most honest answer.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Anniversaries and Organization: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca

Have a good summer. See you on September 3rd