Famous people from Belgium

Do you want to know who the most famous people from Belgium are? This page will give you the answer. Of course it is hard to measure people's fame. Every measuring method will have its drawbacks. We use a simple assumption: people's fame can be measured by the number of times their name appears on the web. This number can be estimated by the page count returned by Google when searching for a name. The page counts can be found in front of the names in the next list.

  1. 2,750,000 Kim Clijsters (tennis player)
  2. 1,240,000 Jacques Brel (musician)
  3. 1,130,000 Jean-Claude Van Damme (actor)
  4.   925,000 Cesar Franck (composer)
  5.   836,000 Justine Henin (tennis player)
  6.   812,000 Helmut Lotti (singer)
  7.   650,000 Rene Magritte (painter)
  8.   639,000 Eddy Merckx (cyclist)
  9.   468,000 Georges Simenon (writer)
  10.   453,000 Hieronymus Bosch (painter)
  11.   411,000 Peter Paul Rubens (painter)
  12.   325,000 Guy Verhofstadt (politician)
  13.   318,000 Hugo Claus (writer)
  14.   318,000 Jacques Rogge (IOC president)
  15.   290,000 Maurice Maeterlinck (writer)
  16.   282,000 Toots Thielemans (musician)
  17.   233,000 Peter Piot (scientist)
  18.   209,000 Sarah Bettens (singer)
  19.   172,000 Ilya Prigogine (scientist)
  20.   150,000 James Ensor (painter)

Compared to an estimation in 1999, tennis player Kim Clijsters (new on the list) is the most famous Belgian, ahead of singer Jacques Brel (previously number three) and former number one, actor Jean-Claude Van Damme. Famous Belgian fiction characters like Tintin, the Smurfs and Hercule Poirot have not been considered.

Contributions for the list can be sent to erikt(at)xs4all.nl . Note that the numbers mentioned in the list are measurements made on a certain time point (16 September 2005). They will probably be slightly different at later times.

External links

If you have a web page about famous people from this country or another then mail the url to me and we will make a link to your page.

Last update: October 28, 2006. erikt(at)xs4all.nl