Given are two python lists with strings in them (names of persons):

list_1 = ['J. Payne', 'George Bush', 'Billy Idol', 'M Stuart', 'Luc van den Bergen']
list_2 = ['John Payne', 'George W. Bush', 'Billy Idol', 'M. Stuart', 'Luc Bergen']

I want a mapping of the names, that are most similar.

'J. Payne'           -> 'John Payne'
'George Bush'        -> 'George W. Bush'
'Billy Idol'         -> 'Billy Idol'
'M Stuart'           -> 'M. Stuart'
'Luc van den Bergen' -> 'Luc Bergen'

Is there a neat way to do this in python? The lists contain in average 5 or 6 Names. Sometimes more, but this is seldom. Sometimes it is just one name in every list, which could be spelled slightly different.

Using the function defined here: http://hetland.org/coding/python/levenshtein.py

>>> for i in list_1:
...     print i, '==>', min(list_2, key=lambda j:levenshtein(i,j))
... 

J. Payne ==> John Payne
George Bush ==> George W. Bush
Billy Idol ==> Billy Idol
M Stuart ==> M. Stuart
Luc van den Bergen ==> Luc Bergen

You could use functools.partial instead of the lambda

>>> from functools import partial
>>> for i in list_1:
...     print i, '==>', min(list_2, key=partial(levenshtein,i))
...

J. Payne ==> John Payne
George Bush ==> George W. Bush
Billy Idol ==> Billy Idol
M Stuart ==> M. Stuart
Luc van den Bergen ==> Luc Bergen