HOUSE OVERSIGHT 022345 overwhelming choice was Mr Obama, with 26 per cent, and Mr Gates behind on 12. YouGov polled in Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the US, Australia, Pakistan, Indonesia, India, China, Egypt, Nigeria and Brazil, representing over half of the world's population and the most populated country on each continent, and spoke to total of 13,895 people around the world. We used a mix of internet and mobile phone surveys. In most countries we achieved representative samples but in some we were unable to achieve good representation of rural communities. Our survey asked two open-ended questions, seeking write-in answers: who do you think is the most famous person in the world, and who do you personally most admire? Although we specified that only living people should be considered, many wanted to choose Nelson Mandela anyway, and had we conducted the survey a month earlier he would have come top. In China there was significant support for Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, with 14 per cent between them, and had those respondents considered only the living, Xi Jinping would have scored even more highly. Who's Who - Narendra Modi, an Indian politician, is the prime ministerial candidate of the BJP, the main opposition party. - Amitabh Bachchan is a Bollywood superstar, who was the "angry young man" of Hindi cinema. - Abdul Kalam is an Indian scientist and was president of his country 2002-07. - Anna Hazare held a series of hunger strikes in India in a successful campaign for anti-corruption laws. - Arvind Kejriwal is the Chief Minister of Delhi, and worked alongside Hazare. - Peng Liyuan, a Chinese folk singer, is the wife of President Xi Jingping. - The philanthropist Abdul Sattar Edhi founded the Edhi Foundation, the largest welfare organisation in Pakistan. - Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo, the governor of Jakarta, is a populist leader who may run in the 2014 Indonesian presidential election. Stephan Shakespeare is CEO of YouGov.