Who Was Alive

Who was alive in 1940?

612 of the people we track were surely alive in 1940. The best known are listed first, with the age each reached that year.

Born in 1940: John Lennon, Pelé, Bruce Lee, Al Pacino, Wangari Muta Maathai, Joseph Brodsky, Muhammad Yunus and J. M. Coetzee.

Died in 1940: Leon Trotsky, Selma Lagerlöf, Emma Goldman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph John Thomson, Neville Chamberlain, Mikhail Bulgakov and Walter Benjamin.

  1. Adolf Hitler51
  2. Albert Einstein61
  3. Ronald Reagan29
  4. Nelson Mandela22
  5. Mahatma Gandhi71
  6. Joseph Stalin62
  7. Pablo Picasso59
  8. Winston Churchill66
  9. Charlie Chaplin51
  10. Elizabeth II14
  11. John F. Kennedy23
  12. Martin Luther King Jr.11
  13. Salvador Dalí36
  14. Rabindranath Tagore79
  15. Franklin Delano Roosevelt58
  16. Marilyn Monroe14
  17. Pope Francis4
  18. Mao Zedong47
  19. Che Guevara12
  20. Charles de Gaulle50
  21. Nikola Tesla84
  22. Neil Armstrong10
  23. Walt Disney39
  24. Elvis Presley5
  25. George Orwell37
  26. Ernest Hemingway41
  27. Margaret Thatcher15
  28. James Joyce58
  29. John Paul II20
  30. Gabriel García Márquez13
  31. Fidel Castro14
  32. J. R. R. Tolkien48
  33. Albert Camus27
  34. Yuri Gagarin6
  35. Henry Ford77
  36. Marlene Dietrich39
  37. Mikhail Gorbachev9
  38. Benito Mussolini57
  39. Jean-Paul Sartre35
  40. Le Corbusier53
  41. Frida Kahlo33
  42. Mother Teresa30
  43. Jimmy Carter16
  44. Benedict XVI13
  45. Harry S. Truman56
  46. Agatha Christie50
  47. George H. W. Bush16
  48. Jorge Luis Borges41
  49. Jawaharlal Nehru51
  50. Dwight D. Eisenhower50
  51. Alan Turing28
  52. Richard Nixon27
  53. Alfred Hitchcock41
  54. Noam Chomsky12
  55. Simone de Beauvoir32
  56. George Bernard Shaw84
  57. John Maynard Keynes57
  58. Niels Bohr55
  59. Bertrand Russell68
  60. Leon Trotsky60 †
  61. John Lennonborn
  62. Max Planck82
  63. Peléborn
  64. Henri Matisse71
  65. Frank Lloyd Wright73
  66. Andy Warhol12
  67. Louis Armstrong39
  68. Kofi Annan2
  69. Virginia Woolf58
  70. Akira Kurosawa30
  71. Lyndon B. Johnson32
  72. Gerald Ford27
  73. Ludwig Wittgenstein51
  74. Indira Gandhi23
  75. Huang Xianfan41
  76. Enrico Fermi39
  77. Naguib Mahfouz29
  78. Nikita Khrushchev46
  79. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry40
  80. Anne Frank11
  81. Saddam Hussein3
  82. H. G. Wells74
  83. Helen Keller60
  84. Tenzin Gyatso5
  85. Pablo Neruda36
  86. Igor Stravinsky58
  87. David Hilbert78
  88. Thomas Mann65
  89. Bruce Leeborn
  90. Erwin Schrödinger53
  91. Silvio Berlusconi4
  92. Herbert Hoover66
  93. Hermann Hesse63
  94. Isaac Asimov20–21
  95. Ingmar Bergman22
  96. Federico Fellini20
  97. Mahathir Mohamad15
  98. Boris Yeltsin9
  99. Ali Khamenei1
  100. Kim Il-sung28
  101. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn22
  102. Jacques Chirac8
  103. T. S. Eliot52
  104. Stanley Kubrick12
  105. Kwame Nkrumah31
  106. Marlon Brando16
  107. Hirohito39
  108. Richard Feynman22
  109. Woody Allen5
  110. Selma Lagerlöf81 †
  111. Bertolt Brecht42
  112. Yasser Arafat11
  113. Ho Chi Minh50
  114. Judy Garland18
  115. Carl Jung65
  116. Brigitte Bardot6
  117. Vladimir Nabokov41
  118. Hebe Camargo11
  119. Umberto Eco8
  120. Eleanor Roosevelt56

The 120 best known of 612 are listed.