The great Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci was born near Florence.
Known throughout Europe, he was employed by the King of France late in his life.
He died in Amboise in the Loire.
Da Vinci is one of over 100,000 notable people whose birthplaces and deathbeds have been mapped in this animation.
It's the work of a team led by Maximilian Schich, based at the University of Texas.
The team wanted to chart hundreds of years of culture. Births are blue. Deaths are red.
Let's start in the far east. This is seventeenth-century Japan, just opening up to the west.
Many of these names are Christian missionaries to the country, some persecuted here for their faith.
In nineteenth-century Australia, migration from Europe increases the traffic.
If you watch this full-screen, you might make out some names.
Among them, the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly, born in the 1850s.
His father was Irish, transported to Australia for stealing pigs.
Back in time now, to the Roman Empire.
There goes Galen, physician and surgeon, on his way from Greece to settle in Rome.
The powerful Roman Empire drew learned people in from all over Europe and beyond.
Cultural sub-centres began to emerge, like Cordova in Spain, and Paris and Avignon in France.
From the twelfth century onwards, all roads no longer lead to Rome.
Migrations between other places are common.
It's a little like a map of budget airline destinations.
As time goes on, we can see that Paris attracts far more cultural migrants than other French cities,
whereas in Germany, several centres compete evenly for migrants' attention.
Even small towns can be attractive cultural centres.
Look at the Côte d'Azur in southern France, popular since the late-nineteenth century.
These data are from freebase.com, a catalogue of well known people and places owned by Google.
In the 1600s, many European-born explorers looked west, striking out to the Americas.
Among them, a fur trader originally from the English countryside, governors from Spain and France
looking after islands in the West Indies, and military men.
These are early settlers and military folk.
You might recognise some of these names.
On the left, there goes John Washington, great grandfather of George Washington, the first President of the United States.
John was born in Essex, England.
The trend was to move from the rural European countryside to the burgeoning cities of the US –
Boston, New York, Washington – hosts to more deaths, in red, than births, in blue.
But that starts to change. Look at all the blue now.
As people build communities and the population on the East Coast expands.
Most often, people move into and along river valleys.
From the eighteenth century onwards, gradually, look how people are starting to move to the West Coast and living out their days there.
That little cluster on the coast is San Francisco.
Transport links make it easier to get to one coast from the other.
First, trains, and then affordable cars.
Around the 1920s, there are still more births than deaths on the East Coast.
Notable people begin to flock to meccas like Hollywood in Los Angeles.
This depiction makes clearer the pull of the West Coast cultural centres, where people move during their lifetimes.
And many well-known names look for a haven for their twilight years.
Next, the team would like to look at how enlightenment thinking and the religious landscape overlap with their cultural maps.