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,
#1451
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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ...
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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.
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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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Oskar Schlemmer
1888 - 1943 (55 years)
Oskar Schlemmer was a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school. In 1923, he was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, after working at the workshop of sculpture. His most famous work is Triadisches Ballett , which saw costumed actors transformed into geometrical representations of the human body in what he described as a "party of form and colour".
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Henry Rand Hatfield
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
Henry Rand Hatfield was an American accountant and prominent pioneer in accounting education, known as author of the 1909 "Modern accounting : its principles and some of its problems." Life and work Born in Chicago to Robert M. and Elizabeth Ann Taft Hatfield, Hatfield obtained BA on the job at the Northwestern University in 1892, and his Ph.D. in political economy at the University of Chicago in 1897.
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Thomas Killigrew
1612 - 1683 (71 years)
Thomas Killigrew was an English dramatist and theatre manager. He was a witty, dissolute figure at the court of King Charles II of England. Life Killigrew was one of twelve children of Sir Robert Killigrew of Hanworth, a courtier to James I, and his wife Mary née Woodhouse; he became a page to King Charles I at about the age of thirteen. According to Samuel Pepys, the boy Killigrew used to volunteer as an extra, or "devil," at the Red Bull Theatre, so that he could see the plays for free. The young Killigrew had limited formal education; the Court and the playhouse were his schoolroom.
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Christoph Martin Wieland
1733 - 1813 (80 years)
Christoph Martin Wieland was a German poet and writer. He is best-remembered for having written the first Bildungsroman , as well as the epic Oberon, which formed the basis for Carl Maria von Weber's opera of the same name. His thought was representative of the cosmopolitanism of the German Enlightenment, exemplified in his remark: "Only a true cosmopolitan can be a good citizen."
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Dimitar Dimov
1909 - 1966 (57 years)
Dimitar Todorov Dimov was a Bulgarian dramatist, novelist and veterinary surgeon. Biography Born in Lovech, Dimov is best known for his best-selling novel Tobacco which was made into the 1962 film Tobacco directed by Nikola Korabov. The plot of Dimov's Tobacco deals with the fates of a number of characters connected to a major tobacco factory. The central thread of the plot is the story of Boris, an ambitious youth of poor origins who renounces his first love Irina to marry Maria, the heiress of the tobacco business. He proceeds to steer the business with great greed and ruthlessness. His wi...
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Narayana Guru
1855 - 1928 (73 years)
Sree Narayana Guru was a philosopher, spiritual leader and social reformer in India. He led a reform movement against the injustice in the caste-ridden society of Kerala in order to promote spiritual enlightenment and social equality. His famous quote was "one caste one religion and one god for all men".
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Deane Waldo Malott
1898 - 1996 (98 years)
Deane Waldo Malott was an American academic and administrator. Biography The son of a banker, Malott was born in Abilene, Kansas and went on to study at the University of Kansas. While at school there, he wrote for the University Daily Kansan and was a brother in the Alpha Nu Chapter of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity and the Alpha Kappa Psi business fraternity. He graduated in 1921 with a degree in economics, and he went on to the Harvard Business School. After his 1923 graduation, he worked as an administrator at Harvard until 1929 when he was hired by the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. He re...
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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.
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Paul B. Coremans
1908 - 1965 (57 years)
Paul Bernard Joseph Marie Coremans was a Belgian scientist who advanced the fields of cultural heritage management and cultural heritage curation. He was the founder and first director of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage.
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Allan Dwan
1885 - 1981 (96 years)
Allan Dwan was a pioneering Canadian-born American motion picture director, producer, and screenwriter. Early life Born Joseph Aloysius Dwan in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Dwan was the younger son of commercial traveler of woolen clothing Joseph Michael Dwan and his wife Mary Jane Dwan . The family moved to the United States when he was seven years old on December 4, 1892, by ferry from Windsor to Detroit, according to his naturalization petition of August 1939. His elder brother, Leo Garnet Dwan , became a physician.
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Philip W. Bell
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
Philip Wilkes Bell was an American accounting scholar and professor of accounting, known for seeking "to bring accounting and economics closer together." Biography Bell was born in 1924 in New York City to Samuel D. Bell and Miriam Wilkes Bell. He obtained his BA in economics from Princeton University in 1947, his MA in economics from University of California, Berkeley in 1949, and back at Princeton his PhD in international economics in 1954 under guidance of Jacob Viner with the thesis, entitled "The Sterling Area in the Post-War World."
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Hidesaburō Ueno
1872 - 1925 (53 years)
Hidesaburō Ueno was a Japanese agricultural scientist, famous in Japan as the guardian of Hachikō, a devoted Akita dog. Life and career Ueno was born on January 19, 1872, in Hisai-shi , Mie Prefecture. In 1895, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University's agriculture department, and in the same year, he entered graduate school to study agricultural engineering and farm implement research. He finished his graduate work on July 10, 1900, and he began teaching at Tokyo Imperial University, as an assistant professor. In 1902, he became an associate professor in the agricultural university.
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James Roscoe Day
1845 - 1923 (78 years)
The Rev. James Roscoe Day, D.D., L.L.D. was an American Methodist minister, educator and chancellor of Syracuse University. Early life and education Day was born in Whitneyville, Maine, on October 17, 1845 to Thomas and Mary Plummer Hillman Day. He attended Maine Wesleyan Seminary and then studied at Bowdoin College but had to stop due to poor health; he eventually received his degree in 1874. He married Anna E. Richards of Auburn, Maine in 1873. In 1872, he was ordained a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church and served as a pastor at Bath, Maine, from 1872 to 1874; Portland, Maine, fr...
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David Leavitt
1791 - 1879 (88 years)
David Leavitt was an early New York City banker and financier. As president of the American Exchange Bank of New York during the Financial Panic of 1837 he represented bondholders of the nascent Illinois and Michigan Canal, allowing completion of the historic canal linking the Midwest with the East Coast. For his role in helping prevent the collapse of the canal scheme, Chicago authorities named Leavitt Street after the financier. Leavitt was also an early art collector, and many of the artist Emanuel Leutze's paintings, including that of Washington at Valley Forge, were initially in Leavitt'...
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Wilbur Olin Atwater
1844 - 1907 (63 years)
Wilbur Olin Atwater was an American chemist known for his studies of human nutrition and metabolism, and is considered the father of modern nutrition research and education. He is credited with developing the Atwater system, which laid the groundwork for nutrition science in the United States and inspired modern Olympic nutrition.
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William C. Durant
1861 - 1947 (86 years)
William Crapo Durant was a leading pioneer of the United States automobile industry and co-founder of General Motors and Chevrolet. He created a system in which a company held multiple marques – each seemingly independent, with different automobile lines – bound under a unified corporate holding company. Durant, along with Frederic L. Smith, co-founded General Motors, as well as Chevrolet with Louis Chevrolet. He also founded Frigidaire.
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George Allen
1832 - 1907 (75 years)
George Allen was an English craftsman and engraver, who became an assistant to John Ruskin and then in consequence a publisher. His name persists in publishing through the Allen & Unwin company. Early life The son of John and Rebecca Allen, he was born on 26 March 1832 at Newark-on-Trent, and was educated at a private grammar school there. His father died in 1849, and in that year he was apprenticed for four years to an uncle , a builder in Clerkenwell, London. He became a skilled joiner, and was employed for three and a half years in that capacity on the woodwork of the interior of Dorchester House, Park Lane.
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Benjamin Graham
1894 - 1976 (82 years)
Benjamin Graham was a British-born American economist, professor and investor. He is widely known as the "father of value investing", and wrote two of the discipline's founding texts: Security Analysis with David Dodd, and The Intelligent Investor . His investment philosophy stressed investor psychology, minimal debt, buy-and-hold investing, fundamental analysis, concentrated diversification, buying within the margin of safety, activist investing, and contrarian mindsets.
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