Baby names
This is one of the hardest tasks in life: choosing names.
Here, I'll explore some interesting naming conventions in history.
The data
There are lots of governments that supply baby name datasets. Some are really good (like the Norwegian) and others are horrible (UK's spreadsheets).
Here, I used Canadian and American data. Both have relatively good datasets:
Canada only has it in French, but this just affects the header.
Visualization
This is really simple to visualize. For a given name, just plot the year and the baby count. This is being done for both boys and girls, since unisex names also exist.
Results
If you just run this program for different names, you can find very interesting graphs indicating many cultural trends.
Historical
Obviously, names can often be retraced to historical events like wars and migration that happened as a result from them.
The world wars
We all know what Germany did in 1914 and 1939. This can also be seen in the names. After both world wars, there was a big migration wave from Germany in the US and Canada. So, we see children being called names like Hans there.
Political leaders
The political leader is probably the most well known person of a nation. Some are generally positively accepted and others are really not liked.
Theodore Roosevelt (USA, 1901-1909)
This name seemed to gain popularity in the last decade. I don't know why that is.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (USA, 1953-1961)
Pierre Trudeau (Canada, 1980-1984)
Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1933-1945)
This name was never really popular in America (the data is a little scattered).
I think it's interesting that it only existed from WWI (because of migration) to WWII (obviously it just didn't exist after that).
Pop culture
This is one of the most influential sectors for names. It includes things like celebrities (e.g. actors and musicians) or movie characters.
Actors
Leonardo DiCaprio
One of the currently big actors. He got really famous after 1993.
Rowan Arkinson
Mr. Bean! The British sitcom was started in 1990. Arkinson probably is the greatest actor of all time.
The name "Rowan" got really popular because of him.
Musicians
These are some of the famous singers in recent history.
Adele
This is currently one of the big music stars. She published her first album in 2008.
Apparently, the name was popular around 1920. I can't tell you why that is.
Billie Eilish
Another classic example of a unisex name. She published her first album in 2019, so a very new singer.
In the recent few years, the name starts to be used more often with girls.
Harry Potter
This is one of if not the most known story in the last century. I think it's really funny that the name "Harry" wasn't impacted at all.
Hermione Granger
One of the main characters. I don't think I have to explain this name any more.
Draco Malfoy
I guess some people exist, if not many, that like that guy.
Luna Lovegood
Apparently, this is a very popular character from the story called Luna. I can't tell you more about her.
Science people
Now this is the stuff I know something about. Honestly, some of these guys would also fit in the pop culture category.
Albert Einstein
Another example I don't have to talk much about. An extremely popular scientist famous for both of the theories of relativity and he won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect in 1922. He published his first paper in 1901.
Alan Turing
Now this is the guy the people reading this post most probably know. He thought of the Turing machine and thus defining computation itself. He published his first paper in 1938 and won the Smith's prize in 1936. At first, this makes no sense. Though, according to turing.org.uk, "Much of Turing's work was not published [...] in a scientific journal".
Stephen Hawking
He is one of the modern genius physicists. He sadly passed away in 2018. Not long ago.
The first big increase that can be seen after 1940 isn't related to Hawking. I think he is responsible for the small spike after 1980.
Misc
Noah
Apparently, the name Noah got really prominent in the last 40 years. I am unable to explain this phenomenon.
Nova
This name got popular in the last decade (really funny, the name is Latin for "new"). It could be related to sci-fi stories, I suppose.
Me
I've also checked my own name (Aino). It seems there only exist woman being called that name in North America. If you don't know, I am not a woman.
The spikes look really big, though the maximum in one year is only 12.
Conclusion
Names can be used to very accurately analyze culture. Sadly, there aren't many records of them in history. Most of the names came with WWI from migration to North America. I also couldn't figure out why some suddenly got popular; maybe I'm just too much of a nerd to know anything about trending culture. If you have any idea why that is or you have an idea for some other data that is interesting, I'd really like to hear about that and I'll update this post.
You can also find this project on GitHub.