The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Business,
#1351
Judy Dlamini
#192101
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Judy Dlamini is a South African businesswoman and author who is the Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand and the founding chairman of Mbekani Group. She served as chairperson of the board of Aspen Pharmacare Holdings from November 2007 until December 2015 while concurrently serving as non-executive director from July 2005 until December 2015. In 2020 the magazine Forbes called her one of Africas 50 most powerful women. In 2022, she was mentioned by Forbes as one of the 50 over 50 women leading the way throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Go to Profile#1352
William Russell
#191998
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Sir William Anthony Bowater Russell is a British financier who served as the 692nd Lord Mayor of the City of London from 2019 to 2021. Biography Educated at Eton and Durham University, graduating B.A., Russell started his career in financial services at First Boston in 1987, and joined Merrill Lynch in 1992, working in Hong Kong, New York and London, before leaving in 2006 for public service.
Go to Profile#1353
Françoise Soussaline
#191817
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Françoise Soussaline is a French biophysicist and businesswoman, a specialist in cell imaging. She studied physics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and completed a PhD in molecular spectroscopy in 1973. She began her career as a researcher at Inserm, where she was involved in the development of the first digital scanner in nuclear medicine. She then joined the Frédéric-Joliot hospital department of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission where she developed Positron emission tomography locally as part of a second thesis in biophysics completed in 1984 at the University of Paris-Sud under the direction of Nobel Prize winner Georges Charpak.
Go to Profile#1354
James Webster
#191828
Overall Influence
1925 - 2022 (97 years)
James Joseph Webster was an Australian politician. He was a Senator for Victoria from 1964 to 1980, representing the National Country Party . He served as Minister for Science and Science and the Environment in the Fraser government. He left politics to become High Commissioner to New Zealand, serving from 1980 to 1983.
Go to Profile#1355
Justin Picard
#191687
Overall Influence
Justin Picard is a Swiss-Canadian engineer and entrepreneur who currently serves as the chief technology officer of Scantrust, a company he co-founded in 2013. He is the inventor of the copy detection pattern , a digital authentication technology for detecting product and document counterfeiting.
Go to Profile#1356
O. Richard Bundy
#89592
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Orrin Richard Bundy is an American music academic. Bundy was the director of the Penn State Athletic Bands, most notably the Penn State Blue Band. He originally joined the University Park faculty of The Pennsylvania State University in 1982 as a graduate assistant, then became Assistant Director of the Blue Band in 1988 before becoming Director in 1996. In addition to his role as director, he teaches courses in conducting, marching band techniques, instrumental music education, and band literature. He retired as director in 2015.
Go to Profile#1357
Helene Maimann
#174560
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Helene Maimann is an Austrian historian, writer, filmmaker and exhibition organizer. She won an Axel Corti Prize, and Käthe Leichter Prize. Life After studying history, German studies and philosophy in Vienna she did her doctorate in 1973 about the Austrian Exile. Between 1980 and 1994 she worked as a lecturer at the universities of Vienna and Salzburg. In the 1980s Maimann managed various exhibitions about Austria’s contemporary history. From 1995 on – after many years of work for the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft - she started working as an editor for the ORF. In addition she published numerous articles and books.
Go to Profile#1358
Michael Azzopardi
#191654
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (39 years)
Michael Azzopardi is a Maltese songwriter and designer. He released his first 4-song EP "Pistola" on February 12, 2021, with Ultralow Records. Biography Michael Azzopardi is a singer-songwriter from Malta. Having debuted his first EP, PISTOLA in February 2021, Michael's songs present an intimate and varied song arrangement with emotionally rich and often vulnerable lyrics.
Go to Profile#1359
Leo Fraser
#192102
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Leo W. Fraser, Jr. was an American lawyer, businessman, and politician. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Fraser served in the United States Marine Corps 1944–1946. He then received his degree from Northeastern University and his law degree from the New England School of Law. He was a claim adjuster in Boston. In 1970 he moved to Pittsfield, New Hampshire, serving as the New Hampshire Insurance Commissioner. In 1976 he established Fraser Financial Services in Pittsfield. A Republican, he served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives from 1985 to 1991 and then in the New Hampshire State Senate from 1991 to 2002.
Go to Profile#1360
John Home
1722 - 1808 (86 years)
Rev John Home was a Scottish minister, soldier and author. His play Douglas was a standard Scottish school text until the Second World War, but his work is now largely neglected. In 1783, he was one of the joint founders of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#1361
Marie Stopes
1880 - 1958 (78 years)
Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant paleontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse.
Go to Profile#1362
Horace Mann Bond
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Horace Mann Bond was an American historian, college administrator, social science researcher and the father of civil-rights leader Julian Bond. He earned graduate and doctoral degrees from University of Chicago at a time when only a small percentage of any young adults attended any college. He was an influential leader at several historically black colleges and was appointed the first president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia in 1939, where he managed its growth in programs and revenue. In 1945, he became the first African-American president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#1363
E. John Russell
1872 - 1965 (93 years)
Sir Edward John Russell was a British soil chemist, agriculture scientist, and director of Rothamsted Experimental Station from 1912 to 1943. He was responsible for hiring R A Fisher for statistical research at Rothamsted and driven by concerns over a lack of international information exchange about agriculture, he initiated the Imperial Agricultural Bureaux, which later became the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux.
Go to Profile#1364
William O. Hotchkiss
1878 - 1954 (76 years)
William Otis Hotchkiss was the third president of Michigan Technological University and the tenth president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Biography He was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin on September 17, 1878. He earned a geology degree in 1903, a civil engineering degree in 1908 and a Ph.D. in 1916, all from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Go to Profile#1365
Kenyon L. Butterfield
1868 - 1935 (67 years)
Kenyon Leech Butterfield was an American agricultural scientist and college administrator known for developing the Cooperative Extension Service at the Land Grant Universities. He was president of the Rhode Island College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts ; the Massachusetts Agricultural College , and the Michigan Agricultural College, from 1924 to 1928.
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Edward Conradi
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Edward Conradi served as President of Florida State College for Women from 1909 to 1941, and as President Emeritus from 1941 until his death in 1944. He was born on 20 February 1869 in New Bremen, Ohio. Conradi received bachelor's and master's degrees from Indiana University Bloomington, and completed a Ph.D. in Psychology from Clark University in 1904.
Go to Profile#1367
James Graaskamp
1933 - 1988 (55 years)
James A. "Jim" Graaskamp was a professor and department chairman of real estate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is credited with developing a multi-faceted ethics-based curriculum now widely used in teaching real estate.
Go to Profile#1368
William Weipers
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Sir William Lee Weipers, FRCVS FRSE was a Scottish veterinary surgeon and educator. Glasgow University's Weiper Memorial Lecture is named in his honour as is the Weipers Centre for Equine Welfare. He was President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons for the period 1963/64.
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Michiyo Tsujimura
1888 - 1969 (81 years)
Michiyo Tsujimura was a Japanese agricultural scientist and biochemist whose research focused on the components of green tea. She was the first woman in Japan to receive a doctoral degree in agriculture.
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Arthur F. Whittem
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Arthur Fisher Whittem was the Chairman of Commission on Extension Courses and Director of the University Extension at Harvard University from 1922 to 1946. He was the second person to hold the position.
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Adolph Matz
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Adolph Matz was a German/American organizational theorist, and Professor of Accounting at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, known for his work on cost accounting. Life and work Matz was born in Karlsruhe or Heidelberg, Germany and started his studies in Weimar Republic. In the early 1930s he came to the United States, and obtained the American citizenship in 1933. He obtained his BA in 1932 at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he also obtained his MA in 1933 and his PhD in 1937. He started his academic career at the Wharton School of the Universit...
Go to Profile#1372
George Colby Chase
1844 - 1919 (75 years)
George Colby Chase was an American intellectual and professor of English who served as the second President of Bates College succeeding its founder, Oren Burbank Cheney, from March 1894 to November 1919.
Go to Profile#1373
John A. Gilruth
1871 - 1937 (66 years)
John Anderson Gilruth was a Scottish-Australian veterinary scientist and administrator. He is particularly noted for being Administrator of the Northern Territory from 1912 to 1918, when he was recalled after an angry mob demanded that he resign. This incident is known as the Darwin Rebellion.
Go to Profile#1374
Louis-Joseph Alcide Railliet
1852 - 1930 (78 years)
Louis-Joseph Alcide Railliet was a French veterinarian and helminthologist. Professor at the Veterinary School of Alfort, he is considered one of the founders of modern parasitology and wrote several books of veterinary parasitology. He chaired the Société zoologique de France in 1891. He was a member of the French Académie Nationale de Médecine, from 29 December 1896 to his death. He received the Legion of Honor.
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Margarete von Wrangell
1877 - 1932 (55 years)
Margarethe Mathilde von Wrangell, after 1928 Princess Andronikow, née Baroness von Wrangell was a Baltic German agricultural chemist and the first female full professor at a German university. Studies and early professional years Margarete von Wrangell originated from the old Baltic German noble house of Wrangel. She spent her childhood in Moscow, Ufa and Reval . She attended a German girls’ school in Tallinn. After passing the teachers' qualifying examination with honours in 1894, she gave private lessons in science for several years. She also occupied herself in painting and writing short stories.
Go to Profile#1376
Frederick Hilgendorf
1874 - 1942 (68 years)
Frederick William Hilgendorf was a New Zealand teacher, lecturer and agricultural scientist. He was born in Waihola, South Otago, New Zealand on 23 January 1874. In 1935, he was awarded the King George V Silver Jubilee Medal. The Hilgendorf Wing at Lincoln University was named after him.
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Sydney Dodd
1874 - 1926 (52 years)
Sydney Dodd, FRCVS , was a British veterinary surgeon and scientist. He contributed to the development of bacteriology and protozoology in England, South Africa and Australia. Dodd established a research station in Queensland that was to become the Animal Research Institute, and he was the first lecturer in veterinary bacteriology at the University of Sydney. He became one of the foremost bacteriologists in Australia.
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Ravi J. Matthai
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Ravi John Matthai was an educationist and a professor and the first full-time Director of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He is also the co-founder, along with Dr. K. Varghese, of Institute of Rural Management, Anand.
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Feliks Młynarski
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Feliks Młynarski was a Polish banker, philosopher and economist. Biography Feliks Młynarski was born to Jan Młynarski, a school teacher, and Honorate née Dziurzyńska. He attended a gymnasium in Jarosław, but because of his involvement in organizing meetings in favor of Polish independence, he was expelled by the Austrian authorities, and had to finish his secondary education at a school in Sanok, in 1903.
Go to Profile#1380
William Tecumseh Sherman
1820 - 1891 (71 years)
William Tecumseh Sherman was an American soldier, businessman, educator, and author. He served as a general in the Union Army during the American Civil War , achieving recognition for his command of military strategy as well as criticism for the harshness of the scorched-earth policies that he implemented against the Confederate States. British military theorist and historian B. H. Liddell Hart declared that Sherman was "the most original genius of the American Civil War" and "the first modern general".
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Vannevar Bush
1890 - 1974 (84 years)
Vannevar Bush was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development , through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including important developments in radar and the initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. He emphasized the importance of scientific research to national security and economic well-being, and was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation.
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Henry Villard
1835 - 1900 (65 years)
Henry Villard was an American journalist and financier who was an early president of the Northern Pacific Railway. Born and raised by Ferdinand Heinrich Gustav Hilgard in the Rhenish Palatinate of the Kingdom of Bavaria, Villard clashed with his more conservative father over politics, and was sent to a semi-military academy in northeastern France. As a teenager, he emigrated to the United States without his parents' knowledge. He changed his name to avoid being sent back to Europe, and began making his way west, briefly studying law as he developed a career in journalism. He supported John C....
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Margaret Sanger
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Margaret Higgins Sanger , also known as Margaret Sanger Slee, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
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Douglas McGregor
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Douglas Murray McGregor was an American management professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and president of Antioch College from 1948 to 1954. He also taught at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. His 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise had a profound influence on education practices.
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Luther Burbank
1849 - 1926 (77 years)
Luther Burbank was an American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science. He developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants over his 55-year career. Burbank's developments included those of fruits, flowers, grains, grasses, and vegetables. He developed a spineless cactus and the plumcot.
Go to Profile#1386
Robert Morris
1734 - 1806 (72 years)
Robert Morris Jr. was an English-American merchant and a Founding Father of the United States. He served as a member of the Pennsylvania legislature, the Second Continental Congress, and the United States Senate, and he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the United States Constitution. From 1781 to 1784, he served as the Superintendent of Finance of the United States, becoming known as the "Financier of the Revolution." Along with Alexander Hamilton and Albert Gallatin, he is widely regarded as one of the founders of the financial system of the...
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Moses Montefiore
1784 - 1885 (101 years)
Sir Moses Haim Montefiore, 1st Baronet, was a British financier and banker, activist, philanthropist and Sheriff of London. Born to an Italian Sephardic Jewish family based in London, after he achieved success, he donated large sums of money to promote industry, business, economic development, education and health among the Jewish community in the Levant. He founded Mishkenot Sha'ananim in 1860, the first Jewish settlement outside the Old City of Jerusalem.
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Luca Pacioli
1445 - 1517 (72 years)
Fra. Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli was an Italian mathematician, Franciscan friar, collaborator with Leonardo da Vinci, and an early contributor to the field now known as accounting. He is referred to as the father of accounting and bookkeeping and he was the first person to publish a work on the double-entry system of book-keeping on the continent. He was also called Luca di Borgo after his birthplace, Borgo Sansepolcro, Tuscany.
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Joseph Breen
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Joseph Ignatius Breen was an American film censor with the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America who applied the Hays Code to film production. Early life and career Breen was the youngest of three sons born to Mary and Hugh A. Breen in Philadelphia. His father had emigrated from Ireland and met his mother Mary in New Jersey. Breen was raised in a strict Roman Catholic home and attended Gesu Parish School until the eighth grade. He then attended Boys Catholic High School. He attended Saint Joseph's College but dropped out after two years, after which he worked as a newspaper reporter for fourteen years in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.
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Eric Kohler
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Eric Louis Kohler was an American accountant, the author of a widely used dictionary of accounting. Life and work Kohler was born on July 9, 1892, in Owosso, Michigan. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1914, and went on to earn a master's degree from Northwestern University. He then worked at Arthur Andersen from 1915 to 1920 . From 1922 to 1928 he held a faculty position at Northwestern, while also working with Paul W. Pettengill for their own accounting firm, Kohler, Pettengill & Co. From 1935 to 1937 he worked again for Arthur Andersen.
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William Rainey Harper
1856 - 1906 (50 years)
William Rainey Harper was an American academic leader, an accomplished semiticist, and Baptist clergyman. Harper helped to establish both the University of Chicago and Bradley University and served as the first president of both institutions.
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John Whitmore
1875 - Present (151 years)
John Whitmore was an American accountant, lecturer, and disciple of Alexander Hamilton Church, known for presenting "the first detailed description of a standard cost system." Biography Whitmore had obtained his licence as Certified Public Accountant in the State of New York. He joined the firm of Patterson, Teele & Dennis where he eventually became, and worked as certified public accountant in New York.
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John D. Rockefeller Jr.
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
John Davison Rockefeller Jr. was an American financier and philanthropist. Rockefeller was the fifth child and only son of Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller. He was involved in the development of the vast office complex in Midtown Manhattan known as Rockefeller Center, making him one of the largest real estate holders in the city. Towards the end of his life, he was famous for his philanthropy, donating over $500 million to a wide variety of different causes, including educational establishments. Among his projects was the reconstruction of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. He was ...
Go to Profile#1394
Jacob van Ruisdael
1628 - 1682 (54 years)
Jacob Isaackszoon van Ruisdael was a Dutch painter, draughtsman, and etcher. He is generally considered the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, a period of great wealth and cultural achievement when Dutch painting became highly popular.
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Edmund Ezra Day
1883 - 1951 (68 years)
Edmund Ezra Day was an American educator. Biography Day received his undergraduate and master's degrees from Dartmouth College and his doctorate in economics from Harvard. While at Dartmouth, he became a brother of Theta Delta Chi. In 1921 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 1923 he went to the University of Michigan, where he served as professor of economics, organizer and first dean of the School of Business Administration, and Dean of the University. He went on to serve as the fifth president of Cornell University from 1937 to 1949. While in office, he ...
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Russell Conwell
1843 - 1925 (82 years)
Russell Herman Conwell was an American Baptist minister, orator, philanthropist, author, lawyer, and writer. He is best remembered as the founder and first president of Temple University in Philadelphia, as the Pastor of The Baptist Temple, and for his inspirational lecture, "Acres of Diamonds". He was born in South Worthington, Massachusetts.
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Harry Anson Finney
1886 - 1966 (80 years)
Harry Anson Finney was an American accountant, and Professor of accounting at the Northwestern University. He is known as prolific author in the field of accounting. who had written a leading textbook in accounting, entitled "Principles of accounting" .
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Martti Saario
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Martti Saario was a Finnish organizational theorist and Professor of Accounting at the Helsinki School of Economics, known for his development of the Finnish expenditure-revenue theory. Saario obtained his PhD at the Helsinki School of Economics in 1945 with a thesis on the "Realisointiperiaate ja käyttöomaisuuden poistot tuloslaskennassa" . He served as Professor of Accounting at the Helsinki School from 1948 until his retirement in 1971. While he focussed on financial accounting , a second Professor of accounting Henrik Virkkunen focussed on management accounting.
Go to Profile#1399
Leland Lawrence Briggs
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Leland Lawrence Briggs was an American accounting scholar, and Professor at the University of Vermont, known as founder of The Accountants Digest, which he edited and published until 1973. Biography Briggs was born in Byron, Minnesota to Edward Wellington, a farmer, and Alice Briggs. After primary education in Byron and Rochester, Minnesota, he obtained his BA in 1923 and his MA in 1924 both at the University of South Dakota. Subsequently, he obtained MBA at Northwestern University in 1927 with the thesis, entitled "Some Legal Aspects of Goodwill." and his PhD from Harvard University in 1930...
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Henrik Virkkunen
1917 - 1963 (46 years)
Johan Henrik Virkkunen was a Finnish organizational theorist and Professor of Accounting at the Helsinki School of Economics, whose 1954 textbook Laskentatoimijohdon apuna influenced Finnish accountancy thinking for decades.
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