56.9478° N, 24.1073° E

RIGA

Most Famous People Born in Riga, Latvia

Notable people

1,671

Peak decade

1980s

Median birth year

1937

Most distinctive

Chess 15.6×

A Baltic capital whose 19th-century German Riga and 20th-century Soviet Riga show up as two overlapping benches. Riga's distinctive professions are chess players at more than fifteen times the global rate — the Tal and Nimzowitsch lineage — with ice hockey players, basketballers, and conductors close behind. Eisenstein, Baryshnikov, and Isaiah Berlin were all born here, and the Jugendstil architecture downtown comes from the same decade as most of the oldest names on the list.