Open Culture – Shows Which Cultural Figures Walked the Earth at the Same Time: From 1200 to Present -“We could call the time in which we live the “Information Age.” Or we could describe it more vividly as the era of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart, Beyoncé and Bob Dylan. Whatever you think of the work of any of these figures in particular, you can hardly deny the impact they’ve had on our culture. Were we living a century ago, we might have said the same of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald (though he hadn’t quite published The Great Gatsby yet), Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud. Were we living in the year 1225, our lives would’ve overlapped with those of Leonardo Fibonacci, Francis of Assisi, Rumi, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as both Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan. All this is laid out visually in The Big Map of Who Lived When, created earlier this year by a Reddit user called Profound_Whatever. As Big Think’s Frank Jacobs writes, the map reveals surprising instances of contemporaneousness, such as that current U.S. President Joe Biden “for about a year was alive at the same time as Nikola Tesla (1854–1943), the Serbian-American inventor who developed the alternating current (AC) system that is used for distributing electricity.”