For bonus points, extract the names, get the years when they lived, and plot them with simile timeplot or something similar. It seems to me that a lot of them were born in the 1800's, but maybe I'm wrong.
Also consider the set of people born 1950 onward. They will not be included because they are on the cusp of being famous and haven't gone through their entire careers yet.
Excellent scraping there. The figure you want is just the first number, the birth year. The number 1999 is meaningless, it's not a birth year, but the year Stanley Kubrick died. You want \((\\d+)-
Drawing conclusions from the data is misleading. The original set is not comprehensive and any human trends you might look for are surely obscured by uncontrolled variation.
1700 - 1799: 18
1800 - 1899: 79
1900 - 1999: 58
Still, given the population explosion, it's unlikely that there were fewer autodidacts in the 20th century than in the 19th.
Raw data: http://pastie.org/783067