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,
#1501
James White
1877 - 1927 (50 years)
James White was an English financier, property developer and speculator. From a working-class family in Lancashire, he worked at a number of jobs before becoming well known in the years before the First World War as a boxing promoter. From that, he moved into property and other transactions, making large sums of money in major deals. He became a racehorse owner and theatre proprietor.
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Harry Williams
1879 - 1922 (43 years)
Harry Hiram Williams was an American composer, lyricist, and publisher of popular music from 1903 until his death in 1922. One of his early hits, written in 1905 with Egbert Van Alstyne, is "In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree". He also produced story ideas and directed silent movies with Mack Sennett for Keystone Studios, according to Sennett's biography The King of Comedy. Williams joined The Lambs Club in 1908.
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Horace B. Carpenter
1875 - 1945 (70 years)
Horace B. Carpenter was an American actor, film director, and screenwriter. He appeared in more than 330 films between 1914 and 1946. He also directed 15 films between 1925 and 1934. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Carpenter died in Hollywood, California, from a heart attack.
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John Lynch
1825 - 1892 (67 years)
John Lynch was a nineteenth-century politician, merchant, manufacturer and newspaper publisher from Maine. Born in Portland, Maine, Lynch attended public schools as a child and graduated from Portland High School in 1842. He engaged in mercantile pursuits, was manager of the Portland Daily Press in 1862 and was a member of the Maine House of Representatives from 1862 to 1864. He was elected a Republican to the United States House of Representatives in 1864, serving from 1865 to 1873. There, Lynch served as chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of the Navy from 1869 to 1871 and of the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of the Treasury from 1871 to 1873.
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John Franklin Witter
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
John Franklin Witter was a veterinarian specialist in avian medicine as well as a researcher and professor at the University of Maine, Orono. Early life Frank Witter was born on June 11, 1906, in Frederick, Maryland, the eighth of nine children. His parents were Harry and “Jennie” Miller Witter. He was raised on a farm, and his father was a professional livestock showman. In his early life, Witter learned about different breeds of farm animals and later said that he saw farming as "a way of life".
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Rufus Carrollton Harris
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Rufus Carrollton Harris was the president of Tulane University from 1937 to 1959 and the 12th dean of the Tulane University Law School, from 1927 to 1937. Education He completed his undergraduate studies at Mercer University and earned two law degrees at Yale University, where he completed his Juris Doctor degree in 1924.
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James H. Dolan
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
James H. Dolan, S.J. was one of the founders and the 2nd President of Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut, from 1944 to 1951. He was born to James B. and Ellen T. Dolan in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and entered the Society of Jesus on August 14, 1905, at St. Andrew-on-Hudson, Hyde Park, New York.
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Henry Adams Bellows
1885 - 1939 (54 years)
Henry Adams Bellows was a newspaper editor and radio executive who was an early member of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. He is also known for his translation of the Poetic Edda for The American-Scandinavian Foundation.
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James Butler
1855 - 1934 (79 years)
James Butler was an American businessman from New York and prominent owner of racehorses and racetracks. With his cousin, Mother Marie Joseph Butler, he founded Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York in memory of his late wife.
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John Skelton
1831 - 1897 (66 years)
Sir John Skelton was a Scottish lawyer, author and administrator. He is best known for his contributions to The Guardian and Blackwood's Magazine. Life Born in Edinburgh, he was the son of James Skelton of Sandford Newton, writer to the signet, sheriff-substitute at Peterhead and original owner of Sandford Lodge, where he was brought up. His mother was Margaret Marjory Kinnear and his sister was Janet Georgina. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh. In 1854 he was admitted a member of the Faculty of Advocates; but concentrated on writing.
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William Paterson
1847 - 1920 (73 years)
William Paterson was an Australian politician and businessman in Western Australia. He was a member of the unicameral Legislative Council from 1889 until its dissolution the following year, and then a member of the newly created Legislative Assembly from 1890 to 1895.
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Lucille Elizabeth Bishop Smith
1892 - 1985 (93 years)
Lucille Elizabeth Bishop Smith was an African American entrepreneur, chef, and inventor. She invented the first hot biscuit mix, and has been called "the first African American businesswoman in Texas".
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Montague Chamberlain
1844 - 1924 (80 years)
Montague Chamberlain was a Canadian-American businessman, naturalist, and ethnographer. Biography Chamberlain was born in St. John, New Brunswick, British North America. He spent the first few decades of his life as a bookkeeper and later manager of a grocery company in St. John. In his mid-twenties, he also became a dedicated amateur ornithologist. In 1883 he co-founded the American Ornithologists' Union, which today stakes its claim as "the oldest and largest organization in the New World devoted to the scientific study of birds." In 1888 Chamberlain became a resident member and editor for the Nuttall Ornithological Club, and a founding member of the American Ornithologists' Union.
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Louis L. Madsen
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Louis Linden Madsen was an American agricultural scientist who served as president of Utah State University from 1950 to 1953 and later as a member of the Washington State University faculty. Biography Madsen was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. He received his bachelor's degree at Utah State Agricultural College . He then received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1934.
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Calvin B. T. Lee
1934 - 1983 (49 years)
Calvin Bow Tong Lee was an American educator and businessman who served as acting President of Boston University from 1970 to 1971 and Chancellor of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County from 1971 to 1976.
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George Smith
Sir George Smith of Madworthy-juxta-Exeter and Madford House, Exeter, Devon, was a merchant who served as MP for Exeter in 1604, was three times Mayor of Exeter and was Exeter's richest citizen, possessing 25 manorss. He was the grandfather of George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle KG and of John Grenville, 1st Earl of Bath .
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Thomas Brattle
1657 - 1713 (56 years)
Thomas Brattle was an American merchant who served as treasurer of Harvard College and member of the Royal Society. He is known for his involvement in the Salem Witch Trials and the formation of the Brattle Street Church.
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William Williams
1832 - 1900 (68 years)
William Williams FRSE PRCVS was a Welsh veterinary surgeon who served as principal of the Dick Veterinary College in Edinburgh and as president of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons . He was the founder and principal of the rival New Veterinary College , originally housed in Gayfield House, Edinburgh.
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Frank L. McVey
1869 - 1953 (84 years)
Frank LeRond McVey was an American economist, educator and academic administrator. He served as the fourth president of the University of North Dakota from 1909 to 1917 and the third president of the University of Kentucky from 1917 to 1940.
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John Ross
1818 - 1871 (53 years)
John Ross was a Canadian lawyer, politician, and businessman. Born in County Antrim, Ireland, he was brought to Canada as an infant. Ross married twice, first to Margaret Crawford who died in 1847, secondly to Augusta Elizabeth Baldwin February 4, 1851, the daughter of Robert Baldwin. Ross was president of the Grand Trunk Railway from 1853 to 1862 when he was succeeded by Sir Edward William Watkin. In 1867, he was appointed to the Senate representing the senatorial division of Ontario. A Conservative, the Honourable John Ross served until his death in 1871 in Toronto, Ontario.
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Dudley Hooper
1911 - 1968 (57 years)
Dudley W. Hooper MA FCA was a British businessman in the UK National Coal Board and an early President of the British Computer Society . He was an accountant and an early promoter of electronic data processing .
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George Smith
1800 - 1868 (68 years)
George Smith was an English businessman, historian and theologian. He is now best known for historical work relating to the Methodist conference. Life Born at Condurrow, near Camborne, Cornwall, on 31 August 1800, he was the son of William Smith, a carpenter and small farmer at Condurrow , by his wife, Philippa Moneypenny . He was educated at the British and Foreign schools in Falmouth, and in Plymouth where his father retired in 1808, when the lease of his farm expired. In 1812 he returned with his parents to Cornwall, and was employed for several years in farm work and carpentering. Having ...
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William Oliver
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Sir William Oliver FRSE was a 20th-century Scottish business advisor and the first Professor of Organisation of Industry and Commerce. Life Oliver was born in Edinburgh in 1885. He was educated at George Watson's College. He then studied engineering at the University of Edinburgh before joining Parsons Peebles Ltd. working on power plant design and creation.
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Jesse E. Moorland
1863 - 1940 (77 years)
Jesse Edward Moorland was an American minister, community executive, civic leader and book collector. Born in Coldwater, Ohio, he was the only child of a farming family. Moorland attended Northwestern Normal University in Ada, Ohio. Then he moved to Washington D. C., where he attended the Theological department of Howard University and earned his master's degree in 1891. He was ordained a Congressional minister. That same year he was hired as secretary of the Washington D.C. branch of the YMCA.
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Owen Roberts
1912 - 1953 (41 years)
Owen Roberts was a British Royal Air Force officer, aviator and founder of Caribbean International Airways. Early life George Marshall Endicott Roberts was born on 17 September 1912 in London. He was a son of the former Irene Helene Murray and Marshall Owen Roberts , an American who became a British subject.
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William Robinson
1840 - 1921 (81 years)
William Robinson was an American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer and businessman. He invented the first track circuit used in railway signaling, a major development that improved railroad safety and efficiency.
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Timothy Brown
1743 - 1820 (77 years)
Timothy Brown was an English banker, merchant and radical, known for his association with other radicals of the time, such as John Horne Tooke, Robert Waithman, William Frend, William Cobbett, John Cartwright and George Cannon; his political views gave him the nickname "Equality Brown". He was also one of the early partners of Whitbread, and became the master of the Worshipful Company of Brewers.
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William Parker
1793 - 1873 (80 years)
William Parker was an American businessman and politician, who served as acting mayor of Boston, Massachusetts in early 1845. He was an unsuccessful candidate in the 1844–45 and 1847 Boston mayoral elections.
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James Law
1838 - 1921 (83 years)
James Law was a Scottish veterinary surgeon who became the first veterinary professor at an American university, teaching biology, agriculture and veterinary medicine at Cornell University from 1868.
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Li Zhaohuan
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Li Zhaohuan , also known as Juwan Usang Ly, was a Chinese educator, politician and banker. He served as President of National Chiao Tung University and the last President of Hangchow University. Biography Li was born in Nanhai County, Guangdong Province in 1898. Li's courtesy name was Yaosheng .
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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.
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Ferdinand Victor Alphons Prosch
1820 - 1885 (65 years)
Ferdinand Victor Alphons Prosch was a Danish doctor, veterinarian and biologist. Prosch's father, Johannes Henrik William Prosch was a secretary in the Danish War Chancery and his mother, Caroline Sophie was French. In 1837 Prosch was a student at the Metropolitan School in Copenhagen and by 1843 he had taken his medical exams. Between 1843 and 1846 Prosch was employed by the university as a prosector, i.e. a preparer of specimens for dissection in the university's Zoological museum.
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John Percival
1863 - 1949 (86 years)
John Percival FLS was an English botanist and professor of agricultural botany, known for his research on the genera Triticum and Aegilops, as well as the taxonomy of wheat. Biography After education from 1868 to 1877 at the National school in Aysgarth, John Percival, a Quaker, was employed at the York Glass Works, owned at that time by a Quaker family named Spence. Percival worked there from 1877 to 1884. Mrs T. A. Cotton, a member of the Spence family, endowed him with a scholarship. He matriculated on 13 October 1884 at St John's College, Cambridge. He graduated there with B.A. in 1887, M.A.
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Kaoru Ishikawa
1915 - 1989 (74 years)
was a Japanese organizational theorist and a professor in the engineering faculty at the University of Tokyo who was noted for his quality management innovations. He is considered a key figure in the development of quality initiatives in Japan, particularly the quality circle. He is best known outside Japan for the Ishikawa or cause and effect diagram , often used in the analysis of industrial processes.
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Harlan Hatcher
1898 - 1998 (100 years)
Harlan Henthorne Hatcher served as the eighth President of the University of Michigan from 1951 to 1967. Biography Harlan Henthorne Hatcher was born on September 9, 1898, in Ironton, Ohio. He received a B.A., an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Ohio State University. He also attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student.
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William J. Vatter
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
William Joseph Vatter was an American accounting scholar and professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and at the University of California-Berkeley known for his "new approach to teaching managerial accounting."
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Henry C. Metcalf
1867 - 1942 (75 years)
Henry Clayton Metcalf was an early American organizational theorist, Professor of Political Science at Tufts College in Massachusetts, and Chairman of Tufts College. He is best known from his publications on management with Ordway Tead and Lyndall Urwick.
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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.
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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.
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Fritz Roethlisberger
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Fritz Jules Roethlisberger was a social scientist and management theorist at the Harvard Business School. Biography Fritz J. Roethlisberger was born in 1898 in New York City. He earned a BA in engineering at Columbia University in 1921, supplementing this degree with a BS in engineering administration from MIT in 1923. Soon after, he shifted to philosophy studies at Harvard, where he earned an M.A. in 1925.
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Ira Baldwin
1895 - 1999 (104 years)
Ira Lawrence Baldwin was the founder and director emeritus of the Wisconsin Academy Foundation. He began teaching bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin in 1927 and a few years later moved into what became a career in administration. He held positions as chair of the Department of Bacteriology, dean of the Graduate School, dean and director of the College of Agriculture, university vice president for academic affairs, and special assistant to the president. He was also involved in programs for agricultural development both in the United States and abroad. Ira Baldwin wrote a hostile revi...
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Harold Koontz
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Harold D. Koontz was an American organizational theorist, professor of business management at the University of California, Los Angeles and a consultant for many of America's largest business organizations. Koontz co-authored the book Principles of Management with Cyril J. O'Donnell; the book has sold around two million copies and has been translated into 15 languages.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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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