CUE Research · Study 17

National Inventors Hall of Fame

The inventors honoured by the National Inventors Hall of Fame since 1973.

The question: Do the people behind the most important inventions share numbers, signs or birthdays?

What stands out

No clear differences. Across every group of 50 or more and every measure, the numbers are within what chance produces.

Worth watching, not enough to claim

  • Birth month

    All inductees: Feb appears 63 times against about 43.4 expected (1.45×).

All inductees: every birth quarter is within normal variation of random birthdays from the same years.

All inductees Expected, random birthdays 1743–1978 Clear difference Worth watching

Context What explains it

Inductees span more than two centuries, from Edison and the Wright brothers to modern engineers, so each baseline uses the group’s own birth years.

Source The data

  • National Inventors Hall of Fame. Retrieved 2026-09-28. View source
  • Every inductee Wikidata records as honoured by the National Inventors Hall of Fame (since 1973), from Edison and the Wright brothers to modern engineers.
  • Verification: 562 of 609 included. A person is included when Wikidata records one birth date at day precision.
  • Expected values: every day of the years each group was born in, weighted by how many people were born in each year, run through CUE’s engine. Weighting matters for Chinese signs and Life Paths, which depend on the year.
  • A difference is called clear only in groups of 50 or more and at least three standard errors from expected. Because each study tests about a hundred values, a clear difference needs 3.5 standard errors; 2.5 to 3.5 is only “worth watching”.

Reproduce it: the raw data snapshots and build scripts are in CUE’s code repository (scripts/data and scripts/build-*-study.mts).

Further reading

  • National Inventors Hall of Fame