Search People Result | Academic Influence

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,

#1451

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.

#1452

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.

#1453

Feliks Młynarski

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.

#1454

William Tecumseh Sherman

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".

#1455

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.

#1456

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....

#1457

Margaret Sanger

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.

#1458

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.

#1459

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.

#1460

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...

#1461

Moses Montefiore

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.

#1462

Carman George Blough

1895 - 1981 (86 years)

Carman George Blough was an American accountant, professor of accounting, and civil servant. He is described as "one of the most influential 'high priests' of the profession in the Twentieth Century." He was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame in 1954.

#1463

Irving Pichel

1891 - 1954 (63 years)

Irving Pichel was an American actor and film director, who won acclaim both as an actor and director in his Hollywood career. Career Pichel was born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh. He attended Pittsburgh Central High School with George S. Kaufman. The two collaborated on a play, The Failure. Pichel graduated from Harvard University in 1914 and went immediately into the theater. Pichel's first work in musical theatre was as a technical director for the theater of the San Francisco Bohemian Club; he also helped with the annual summer pageant, held at the elite Bohemian Grove, in which up to 300 of its wealthy, influential members from finance and government participate.

#1464

Leslie Henson

1891 - 1957 (66 years)

Leslie Lincoln Henson was an English comedian, actor, singer producer for films and theatre, and film director. He initially worked in silent films and Edwardian musical comedy and became a popular music hall comedian who enjoyed a long stage career. He was famous for his bulging eyes, malleable face and raspy voice and helped to form the Entertainments National Service Association during the Second World War.

#1465

Earl Carroll

1893 - 1948 (55 years)

Earl Carroll was an American theatrical producer, director, writer, songwriter and composer. Early life Carroll was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1893. He lived as an infant in the Nunnery Hill section of the North Side. Carroll later said he left the area "because there were too many tin cans and goats up there then."

#1466

George Frederick Holmes

1820 - 1897 (77 years)

George Frederick Holmes , emigrated to the United States where he taught history and literature and became the first Chancellor of the University of Mississippi . From 1857 until his death, Holmes taught literature, history and political economy at the University of Virginia and became known for textbooks designed for use in schools in the southern United States.

#1467

Walter Bagehot

1826 - 1877 (51 years)

Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market .

#1468

Bob Fosse

1927 - 1987 (60 years)

Robert Louis Fosse was an American actor, choreographer, dancer, and film and stage director. He directed and choreographed musical works on stage and screen, including the stage musicals The Pajama Game , Damn Yankees , How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying , Sweet Charity , Pippin , and Chicago . He directed the films Sweet Charity , Cabaret , Lenny , All That Jazz , and Star 80 .

#1469

Sergei Diaghilev

Sergei Diaghilev

1872 - 1929 (57 years)

Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev , also known as Serge Diaghilev, was a Russian art critic, patron, ballet impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes, from which many famous dancers and choreographers would arise.

#1470

George Pullman

1831 - 1897 (66 years)

George Mortimer Pullman was an American engineer and industrialist. He designed and manufactured the Pullman sleeping car and founded a company town in Chicago for the workers who manufactured it. This ultimately led to the Pullman Strike due to the high rent prices charged for company housing and low wages paid by the Pullman Company. His Pullman Company also hired African-American men to staff the Pullman cars, known as Pullman porters, who provided elite service and were compensated only in tips.

#1471

Marcus Garvey

1887 - 1940 (53 years)

Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was a Jamaican political activist. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League , through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa. Ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist, his ideas came to be known as Garveyism.

#1472

Lionel Newman

1916 - 1989 (73 years)

Lionel Newman was an American conductor, pianist, and film and television composer. He won the Academy Award for Best Score of a Musical Picture for Hello Dolly! with Lennie Hayton in 1969. He is the brother of Alfred Newman and Emil Newman, uncle of composers Randy Newman, David Newman, Thomas Newman, Maria Newman, and grandfather of Joey Newman. His 11 nominations contribute to the Newmans being the most nominated Academy Award extended family, with a collective 92 nominations in various music categories.

#1473

Abram W. Harris

1858 - 1935 (77 years)

Abram Winegardner Harris was the 8th president of Northwestern University, serving from 1906 to 1916. He was also the first President of the University of Maine from 1896 to 1906. Biography Abram W. Harris was born in Philadelphia on November 7, 1858. A graduate of Wesleyan University , he came to Northwestern after a time as President of Maine State College , where he oversaw the transformation of the school into the University of Maine in 1896. At Northwestern, he helped develop the School of Commerce in 1908. He retired from Northwestern after 10 years to take a position with the Methodis...

#1474

Victor L. Butterfield

Victor L. Butterfield

1904 - 1975 (71 years)

Victor L. Butterfield was an American philosopher and educator who served as the eleventh President of Wesleyan University from 1943 to 1967. Early life and education He was born February 7, 1904, in Kingston, Rhode Island to Kenyon L. Butterfield and Harriet M Butterfield. He attended Cornell University and received his B.A. in 1927 and M.A. in 1928. In 1936 he earned a Ph.D. from Harvard.

#1475

Olinde Rodrigues

Olinde Rodrigues

1795 - 1851 (56 years)

Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues , more commonly known as Olinde Rodrigues, was a French banker, mathematician, and social reformer. In mathematics Rodrigues is remembered for Rodrigues' rotation formula for vectors, the Rodrigues formula about series of orthogonal polynomials and the Euler–Rodrigues parameters.

#1476

Jonathan Maxcy

1768 - 1820 (52 years)

Jonathan Maxcy was an American Baptist minister and college president. He was the second president of Brown University , of which he was also a graduate; the third president of Union College; and the first president of the University of South Carolina .

#1477

Mabel Smith Douglass

1874 - 1933 (59 years)

Mabel Smith Douglass was the first dean, in 1918, of the New Jersey College for Women in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1955, the college was renamed Douglass College in her honor. Douglass College is now part of Rutgers University and the library is named for Mabel Smith Douglass. The library "has a primary collection focus on women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. It is also home to the Performing Arts Library and the New Brunswick Libraries media collection."

#1478

Gustaf Gründgens

Gustaf Gründgens

1899 - 1963 (64 years)

Gustaf Gründgens , born Gustav Heinrich Arnold Gründgens, was one of Germany's most famous and influential actors of the 20th century, and artistic director of theatres in Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Hamburg. His career continued unimpeded through the years of the Nazi regime; the extent to which this can be considered as deliberate collaboration with the Nazis is hotly disputed.

#1479

William Ivey

1838 - 1892 (54 years)

William Edward Ivey was a New Zealand agricultural scientist and director. He was the inaugural head of what is now Lincoln University. Early life Ivey was born in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia on 26 August 1838. He was the son of William Edward Ivey, a clerk and landowner, and Elizabeth Ivey . He received his education in England and attended the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester. He managed a farm in England for a while before he came to New Zealand in 1867, where he took up land. Because of the ongoing New Zealand Wars, he almost immediately moved on to Australia. He spent four years...

#1480

Frank Pierrepont Graves

Frank Pierrepont Graves

1869 - 1956 (87 years)

Frank Pierrepont Graves was Commissioner of the New York State Education Department from 1921 to 1940. Prior to assuming the commissionership, Graves was a noted historian of education, college administrator, and author.

#1481

Augustus Harris

Augustus Harris

1852 - 1896 (44 years)

Sir Augustus Henry Glossop Harris was a British actor, impresario, and dramatist, a dominant figure in the West End theatre of the 1880s and 1890s. Born into a theatrical family, Harris briefly pursued a commercial career before becoming an actor and subsequently a stage-manager. At the age of 27 he became the lessee of the large Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where he mounted popular melodramas and annual pantomimes on a grand and spectacular scale. The pantomimes featured leading music hall stars such as Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd, Little Tich and Vesta Tilley. The profits from these productions subsidised his opera seasons, equally lavish, starrily cast and with an innovative repertoire.

#1482

George Currie

1896 - 1984 (88 years)

Sir George Alexander Currie was an agricultural scientist, university professor and administrator. He was born in Grange, Banffshire, Scotland on 13 August 1896. After serving in the Gordon Highlanders during the first world war, Currie studied at the University of Aberdeen, graduating in 1923 with BSc and BAgSc, including First Class Honours in zoology and geology. After graduation, Currie and his wife emigrated to Australia where he managed a sugar-cane plantation in Queensland. In 1926 he joined the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Stock as an assistant entomologist. In 1929 he moved to Canberra to take up a position with the Council for Scientific and Industry Research.

#1483

Enzo Ferrari

1898 - 1988 (90 years)

Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari was an Italian motor racing driver and entrepreneur, the founder of the Scuderia Ferrari Grand Prix motor racing team, and subsequently of the Ferrari automobile marque. He was widely known as Il Commendatore or Il Drake. In his final years he was often referred to as L'Ingegnere or Il Grande Vecchio .

#1484

Woo Jang-choon

1898 - 1959 (61 years)

Woo Jang-choon, U Nagaharu in Japanese, was an agricultural scientist and botanist active in Korea under Japanese rule and later in South Korea, famous for his discoveries in the genetics and breeding of plants.

#1485

Theo Lingen

1903 - 1978 (75 years)

Theo Lingen , born Franz Theodor Schmitz, was a German actor, film director and screenwriter. He appeared in more than 230 films between 1929 and 1978, and directed 21 films between 1936 and 1960. Life and career Lingen was born the son of a lawyer in the city of Hanover, and grew up there. He attended the Royal Goethe Gymnasium – the predecessor of the Goethe School – in Hanover, but left before taking the Abitur . His theatrical talent was discovered during rehearsals for a school performance at the Schauburg boulevard theatre.

#1486

Ferdinand de Lesseps

Ferdinand de Lesseps

1805 - 1894 (89 years)

Ferdinand Marie, Comte de Lesseps was a French diplomat and later developer of the Suez Canal, which in 1869 joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas, substantially reducing sailing distances and times between Europe and East Asia.

#1487

John Charles Walker

1893 - 1994 (101 years)

John Charles Walker was an American agricultural scientist noted for his research of plant disease resistance. The New York Times said that Walker's "pioneering research in disease resistance in plants had a strong impact on world agriculture" and that Walker "was the first scientist to demonstrate the chemical nature of disease resistance in plants". Walker is most known for developing disease-resistant varieties of onions, cabbages, beans, peas, beets and cucumbers. The National Academy of Sciences said that he was considered "one of the world's greatest plant pathologists" and that "his fundamental discoveries of plant disease resistance made a lasting impact on world agriculture".

#1488

Edward Henry Busk

1844 - 1926 (82 years)

Sir Edward Henry Busk was Vice Chancellor of London University from 1905-1907. Early life He was educated at University College School in Hampstead, London. He then attended University College London and then at Manchester New College .

#1489

Lowell Thomas

1892 - 1981 (89 years)

Lowell Jackson Thomas was an American writer, broadcaster, and traveler, best remembered for publicising T. E. Lawrence . He was also involved in promoting the Cinerama widescreen system. In 1954, he led a group of New York City-based investors to buy majority control of Hudson Valley Broadcasting, which, in 1957, became Capital Cities Television Corporation.

#1490

A. Edward Sutherland

A. Edward Sutherland

1895 - 1973 (78 years)

Albert Edward Sutherland was a film director and actor. Born in London, he was from a theatrical family. His father, Al Sutherland, was a theatre manager and producer and his mother, Julie Ring, was a vaudeville performer. He was a nephew of both Blanche Ring and Thomas Meighan, who was married to Frances Ring, another of his mother's sisters.

#1491

William Harvey

1796 - 1866 (70 years)

William Harvey was a British wood-engraver and illustrator. Born at Newcastle upon Tyne, Harvey was the son of a bath-keeper. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to Thomas Bewick, and became one of his favorite pupils. Bewick describes him as one "who both as an engraver & designer, stands preeminent" at his day . He engraved many woodblocks for Bewick's Aesop's Fables .

#1492

Henry Metcalfe

1847 - 1927 (80 years)

Captain Henry Metcalfe was an officer in the United States Army Ordnance Corps, inventor and early organizational theorist, known for his 1873 invention of a detachable magazine for small arms, for his work on modern management accounting, the development of the "time card" and his theory on the role of middle management.

#1493

William Kissam Vanderbilt

William Kissam Vanderbilt

1849 - 1920 (71 years)

William Kissam Vanderbilt I was an American heir, businessman, philanthropist and horsebreeder. Born into the Vanderbilt family, he managed his family's railroad investments. Early life William Kissam Vanderbilt I was born on December 12, 1849, in New Dorp, New York, on Staten Island. His parents were Maria Louisa Kissam and William Henry Vanderbilt, the eldest son of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, an heir to his fortune and a prominent member of the Vanderbilt family who was the richest American after he took over his father's fortune in 1877 until his own death in 1885.

#1494

Reinhold Schünzel

Reinhold Schünzel

1886 - 1954 (68 years)

Reinhold Schünzel was a German actor and director, active in both Germany and the United States. The son of a German father and a Jewish mother, he was born in St. Pauli, the poorest part of Hamburg. Despite being of Jewish ancestry, Schünzel was allowed by the Nazis to continue making films for several years until he left in 1937 to live abroad.

#1495

John Foster

1886 - 1959 (73 years)

John Foster , was a cartoonist and film director. He is remembered for his direction in over a hundred films, including the Van Beuren Tom and Jerry series and the early sound-on-film cartoon "Dinner Time". Later in the 1930s, he created Gandy Goose for Terrytoons.

#1496

Christian Ernst Stölzel

1792 - 1837 (45 years)

Christian Ernst Stölzel was a German painter, etcher and engraver. Biography He was born to , an engraver and art professor, who provided him and his two siblings with their primary education. At the age of sixteen, he decided that he too would become an engraver. In pursuit of that goal, he went to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he took lessons in perspective from . He also spent many evenings in self-study at the Skulpturensammlung.

#1497

Mary Seacole

1805 - 1881 (76 years)

Mary Jane Seacole was a British nurse and businesswoman. Seacole was born to a Creole mother who ran a boarding house and had herbalist skills as a "doctress". In 1990, Seacole was awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit. In 2004, she was voted the greatest black Briton in a survey conducted in 2003 by the black heritage website Every Generation.

#1498

Henry P. Armsby

1853 - 1921 (68 years)

Henry Prentiss Armsby was an American agricultural chemist, animal nutritionist, and academic administrator. He served as Vice Principal and Acting Principal of the Storrs Agricultural School , associate director of the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station , and director of the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Institute of Animal Nutrition at the Pennsylvania State University.

#1499

Benjamin Franklin Greene

1817 - 1895 (78 years)

Benjamin Franklin Greene was the third senior professor and first director of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was born in Lebanon, New Hampshire on October 25, 1817. He graduated from Rensselaer in 1842. He taught mathematics at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland from 1843 to 1846. He married in 1848 but his wife died two years later.

#1500

Raoul Wallenberg

Raoul Wallenberg

1912 - 1947 (35 years)

Raoul Gustaf Wallenberg was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat, and humanitarian. He saved thousands of Jews in German-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust from German Nazis and Hungarian fascists during the later stages of World War II. While serving as Sweden's special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings which he declared as Swedish territory.

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