Follow Business Insider: You've seen Google's annual lists of trendy search terms, featuring things like  robin williams, world cup, and ebola , but those show only the most unusually popular terms, not the most popular terms overall.
Murasaki Shikibu is the best known writer to emerge from Japan's glorious Heian period. Her novel, The Tale of Genji (Genji-monogatari) is considered to be one of the world's finest and earliest novels. Some argue that Murasaki is the world's first modern novelist.
Anaximander 610 BCE â 546 BCE. Anaximander of Miletus is the famous pupil and, in many ways, a philosophical successor to Thales himself. He is credited for being the first known writer on philosophy â given that he is the only known philosopher to have authored the first surviving lines of western philosophy.ythagoras 570 BCE â 495 BCE. Another pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Pythagoras is someone known far more for his theories and ideas in mathematics than in philosophy. In fact, he is best known for the theorem in geometry that is named after him.