47.3744° N, 8.5411° E

ZURICH

Most Famous People Born in Zurich, Switzerland

Notable people

2,462

Peak decade

1940s

Median birth year

1941

Most distinctive

Author 3.5×

A Reformed Swiss city with a disproportionately large academic-and-letters bench. Zurich's distinctive professions are authors, academics, architects, artists, and physicists — the trades of a German-language university town that runs from Gottfried Keller through Max Frisch on the literary side and Einstein and Pauli on the scientific. Pestalozzi, Rorschach, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross all belong to this bench, and nearly eighty per cent of the names were born after 1900.