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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Business,
#1501
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.
Go to Profile#1502
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.
Go to Profile#1503
Robert Gibson Eccles
#1504
Malcolm Burns
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Sir Malcolm McRae Burns was a New Zealand agricultural scientist, university lecturer and administrator. Early life, education, and family Burns was born in Ashley Bank, North Canterbury, on 19 March 1910, the son of Emily Burns and John Edward Burns. He was educated at Rangiora High School, and then studied at Canterbury University College, graduating Master of Science in 1932. He won a doctoral scholarship to the United Kingdom, and completed a PhD, supervised by Albert William Borthwick and William Gammie Ogg, at the University of Aberdeen in 1934; the title of his thesis was A study of ...
Go to Profile#1505
Arnold Theiler
1867 - 1936 (69 years)
Sir Arnold Theiler KCMG Pour le Mérite is considered to be the father of veterinary science in South Africa. He was born in Frick, Canton Aargau, Switzerland. He received his higher education, and later qualified as a veterinarian, in Zurich. In 1891, Theiler travelled to South Africa and at first found employment as a farm worker on Irene Estates near Pretoria, owned by Nellmapius, but later that year started practising as a veterinarian.
Go to Profile#1506
Edward P. Moxey
1881 - 1943 (62 years)
Edward Preston Moxey Jr. was an American accountant, and the first Professor of Accounting at the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. He is known for his early works on cost-keeping in factories, which describe the elementary principles of cost accounting.
Go to Profile#1507
Oscar Loew
1844 - 1941 (97 years)
Oscar Loew was a German agricultural chemist, active in Germany, the United States, and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Biography Loew was born in Marktredwitz, Bavaria, where his father was a pharmacist. He studied at the University of Munich under the noted chemist Justus von Liebig; he was Liebig's last student. Loew was an assistant in plant physiology at the City College of New York and participated in four expeditions to the southwestern United States in 1882 before returning to Munich, Germany, where he collaborated with Carl Nägeli. Loew became associate professor at Munich University in 1886.
Go to Profile#1508
Jean Negulesco
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Jean Negulesco was a Romanian-American film director and screenwriter. He first gained notice for his film noirs and later made such notable films as Johnny Belinda , How to Marry a Millionaire , Titanic , and Three Coins in the Fountain .
Go to Profile#1509
William W. Hagerty
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
William Walsh Hagerty was a teacher, former NASA Adviser, and president of Drexel University. Early life Born to William Walsh Hagerty and Alice Amanda Hagerty in 1916 Hagerty was raised in Minnesota. In 1939 Hagerty received a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota. Hagerty went on to receive his M.S. in 1943 and his Ph.D. in 1947 from the University of Michigan. After receiving his first degree Hagerty worked as an engineer until 1940.
Go to Profile#1510
Umetaro Suzuki
1874 - 1943 (69 years)
was a Japanese scientist, born in what is now part of Makinohara, Shizuoka, Japan. He was a member of the Imperial Academy, and a recipient of the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasure and the Order of Culture. His research was among the earliest of modern vitamin research.
Go to Profile#1511
George Eastman
1854 - 1932 (78 years)
George Eastman was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. After a decade of experiments in photography, he patented and sold a roll film camera, making amateur photography accessible to the general public for the first time. Working as the treasurer and later president of Kodak, he oversaw the expansion of the company and the film industry.
Go to Profile#1512
Samuel Lowell Price
1821 - 1887 (66 years)
Samuel Lowell Price was an English accountant. He is best known for having co-founded, with William Hopkins Holyland and Edwin Waterhouse, the accountancy practice of Price Waterhouse that now forms part of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Go to Profile#1513
Eric K. Clemons
#1514
Marcel Pagnol
1895 - 1974 (79 years)
Marcel Paul Pagnol was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Regarded as an auteur, in 1946, he became the first filmmaker elected to the . Although his work is less fashionable than it once was, Pagnol is still generally regarded as one of France's greatest 20th-century writers and is notable for the fact that he excelled in almost every medium—memoir, novel, drama and film.
Go to Profile#1515
John Lloyd Newcomb
1881 - 1954 (73 years)
John Lloyd Newcomb was an American educator. He served as the second president of the University of Virginia, ascending to the position after the death of Edwin Alderman. Newcomb, a member of the engineering faculty of the university, oversaw the university through the Depression and the Second World War and managed its physical expansion, including the building of Scott Stadium, the Bayly Art Museum, and Alderman Library.
Go to Profile#1516
Max Fesca
1846 - 1917 (71 years)
Max Fesca was a German specialist in agricultural science and agronomy, hired by the Meiji government of Japan as a foreign advisor from 1882 to 1894. Biography Fesca was born in Soldin, Neumark, Province of Brandenburg, Prussia as the son of a post office manager. From 1868 he studied agriculture and natural sciences at the University of Halle, and moved in 1873 to the University of Göttingen. His thesis in agricultural chemistry was based on the physical composition of tobacco leaves. He then worked for three semesters as a teaching assistant at the University of Halle. At the end of 1874 he returned to Göttingen and qualified as an expert on soil sciences.
Go to Profile#1517
Sacha Guitry
1885 - 1957 (72 years)
Alexandre-Pierre Georges Guitry , known as Sacha Guitry, was a French stage actor, film actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright of the boulevard theatre. He was the son of a leading French actor, Lucien Guitry, and followed his father into the theatrical profession. He became known for his stage performances, particularly in boulevardier roles. He was also a prolific playwright, writing 115 plays throughout his career. He was married five times, always to rising actresses whose careers he furthered. Probably his best-known wife was Yvonne Printemps to whom he was married between 1919 and...
Go to Profile#1518
Braxton Craven
1822 - 1882 (60 years)
Braxton Craven was an American educator. He served as the second president of the institution that became Duke University from 1842 to 1863 and then again from 1866 to 1882. The institution was known as Union Institute from 1841 to 1851, Normal College until 1859, and Trinity College until 1924. He taught ancient languages, ethics, philosophy, law, rhetoric, and logic at Duke.
Go to Profile#1519
Frank Thomas Magiera
#1520
Geoffrey Peren
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Brigadier Sir Geoffrey Sylvester Peren was an agricultural scientist, university professor, and agricultural college principal, as well as a soldier in the two world wars, serving in the Canadian, British, and New Zealand armies.
Go to Profile#1521
Stephen Hemsley Longrigg
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Stephen Hemsley Longrigg OBE was a British military governor, petroleum company manager and a leading authority on the history of oil in the Middle East. Early life and career Longrigg was born in Sevenoaks, Kent and educated at Highgate School in London, where he won the Governors' gold medal and was later Chairman of Governors from 1954 - 1965. After winning a scholarship to study Classics at Oriel College, Oxford, where he gained a 1st in Honour Moderations, he served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment from 1914, was twice mentioned in dispatches and then returned to Oxford from Iraq for his MA degree at the end of his military service in 1921.
Go to Profile#1522
Harrington Emerson
1853 - 1931 (78 years)
Harrington Emerson was an American efficiency engineer and business theorist, who founded the management consultancy firm Emerson Institute in New York City in 1900. Known for his pioneering contributions to scientific management, Emerson may have done more than anyone else to popularize the topic: His public testimony in 1910 to the Interstate Commerce Commission that the railroads could save $1,000,000 a day started a nationwide interest in the subject of "efficiency".
Go to Profile#1523
John Thompson
1802 - 1891 (89 years)
John Thompson was an American banker, financial publisher, and dealer in bank notes. Early life Thompson was born in Peru, Massachusetts, near Pittsfield on November 27, 1802. He was the son of a farmer and former Revolutionary War soldier.
Go to Profile#1524
Oskar Kellner
1851 - 1911 (60 years)
Oskar Johann Kellner was a German agricultural scientist . Biography Kellner was invited to teach in Japan as a foreign advisor by the Meiji government of the Empire of Japan to improve on Japanese agricultural productivity.
Go to Profile#1525
Terence Fisher
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Terence Fisher was a British film director best known for his work for Hammer Films. He was the first to bring gothic horror alive in full colour, and the sexual overtones and explicit horror in his films, while mild by modern standards, were unprecedented in his day. His first major gothic horror film was The Curse of Frankenstein , which launched Hammer's association with the genre and made British actors Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee leading horror stars of the era. He went on to film several adaptations of classic horror subjects, including Dracula , The Mummy , and The Curse of the W...
Go to Profile#1526
Matthew Boulton
1728 - 1809 (81 years)
Matthew Boulton was an English businessman, inventor, mechanical engineer, and silversmith. He was a business partner of the Scottish engineer James Watt. In the final quarter of the 18th century, the partnership installed hundreds of Boulton & Watt steam engines, which were a great advance on the state of the art, making possible the mechanisation of factories and mills. Boulton applied modern techniques to the minting of coins, striking millions of pieces for Britain and other countries, and supplying the Royal Mint with up-to-date equipment.
Go to Profile#1527
Dr Danny W. Scott
#1528
Charles M. Schwab
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Charles Michael Schwab was an American steel magnate. Under his leadership, Bethlehem Steel became the second-largest steel maker in the United States, and one of the most important heavy manufacturers in the world.
Go to Profile#1529
John Taylor
1781 - 1864 (83 years)
John Taylor was an English publisher, essayist, and writer. He is noted as the publisher of the poets John Keats and John Clare. Life He was born in East Retford, Nottinghamshire, the son of James Taylor and Sarah Drury; his father was a printer and bookseller. He attended school first at Lincoln Grammar School and then he went to the local grammar school in Retford. He was originally apprenticed to his father, but eventually he moved to London and worked for James Lackington in 1803. Taylor left after a short while because of low pay.
Go to Profile#1530
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.
Go to Profile#1531
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.
Go to Profile#1532
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.
Go to Profile#1533
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."
Go to Profile#1534
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.
Go to Profile#1535
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 .
Go to Profile#1536
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 .
Go to Profile#1537
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.
Go to Profile#1538
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.
Go to Profile#1539
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.
Go to Profile#1540
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.
Go to Profile#1541
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...
Go to Profile#1542
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.
Go to Profile#1543
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.
Go to Profile#1544
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 .
Go to Profile#1545
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."
Go to Profile#1546
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.
Go to Profile#1547
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...
Go to Profile#1548
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.
Go to Profile#1549
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.
Go to Profile#1550
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.
Go to Profile