MyHeritage.com has created a ranked list of the world's top 4,000 celebrities in the past 2 centuries. This was created using the wonderful Wikipedia project; the ranking that determines which celebrities are "more important" than others was calculated using an algorithm proprietary to MyHeritage.com.

The MyHeritage.com celebrity collection includes not just the typical movie stars but all famous men and women who helped shape the 19th, 20th and beginning of 21st century in the areas of art, music, science, literature, sports, space, politics and more.

We built this collection to test and improve our face recognition technology.
We knew that if we could do a good job of recognizing thousands of well known celebrities we could do the same for hundreds of thousands of people in anyone's photos and family tree. After developing and using the collection we decided to give access to it on our site because of its educational and fun uses. Who wouldn't like to find out which celebrity resembles them the most? Or pit their knowledge and wits trying to recognize the world's top 100 celebrities based on their faces, or their names?

Since this collection was built for face recognition, which is done primarily via photos, we had to cut off celebrities born before 1800 as most of them have not been fortunate to be photographed. It is true that the first successful photographic process, the Daguerreotype, was announced in 1839 and some people born before 1800 have such early photographs who survived to this day, but for the most part the cut-off birth date of 1800 correctly serves to divide between photographed celebrities and earlier celebrities whose images are known only by paintings or sculptures. Sorry, Aristotle and Socrates!

In the Celeb Quiz, MyHeritage.com tests your knowledge with random photos of celebrities where you pick the right answer from a multiple choice. You can pick a category of your choice, like female movie actresses, or maybe famous aviators, and see how well you recognize the famous people from that category. One type of quiz shows you faces and lets you pick a matching name for each face. The other quiz shows names and lets you pick a matching face for each name. Good luck!