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
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.
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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.
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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 .
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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."
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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 .
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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W. Averell Harriman
1891 - 1986 (95 years)
William Averell Harriman , better known as Averell Harriman, was an American Democratic politician, businessman, and diplomat. The son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman, he served as Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman, and later as the 48th governor of New York. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952 and 1956, as well as a core member of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".
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Dave O'Brien
1912 - 1969 (57 years)
Dave O'Brien was an American film actor, director, and screenwriter. Life and career Born in Big Spring, Texas, to Mike Fronabarger and his wife, Mary Edith, he started his film career performing in choruses and working as a stunt double before gradually winning larger roles, mostly in B pictures. He adopted "O'Brien" as his acting surname. He had roles in early Western movies such as Lightnin Crandall , starring Bob Steele.
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Arthur Guinness
1725 - 1803 (78 years)
Arthur Guinness was an Irish brewer, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. The inventor of Guinness beer, he founded the Guinness Brewery at St. James's Gate in 1759. Guinness was born in Ardclogh, near Celbridge, County Kildare in 1725. His father was employed by Arthur Price, a vicar of the Church of Ireland. Guinness himself was later employed by Price, and upon his death in 1752, both he and his father were bequeathed funds from Price's will. Guinness then worked at his stepmother's public house before founding a brewery in Leixlip. In 1759, during a financial crisis that created an abundance...
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Joseph Saunders
1773 - 1845 (72 years)
Joseph Saunders, , sometimes also Joseph Sanders , was an engraver, illustrator, publisher and professor of fine art, active in London, Saint Petersburg and Vilnius. He has sometimes become conflated with the London painter and miniaturist, Joseph Saunders . Professor Anthony Cross suggests a further confusion with a 'John Saunders', born 1750, who also went to Russia.
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Cyril G. Hopkins
1866 - 1919 (53 years)
Cyril George Hopkins was an American agricultural chemist who initiated the Illinois long-term selection experiment in 1896. He was also noted for his extensive research and writings on the soil of Illinois.
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John Slidell
1793 - 1871 (78 years)
John Slidell was an American politician, lawyer, and businessman. A native of New York, Slidell moved to Louisiana as a young man and became a Representative and Senator. He was one of two Confederate diplomats captured by the United States Navy from the British ship RMS Trent in 1861 and later released. He was the older brother of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, a US naval officer.
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Lambert Hillyer
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Lambert Harwood Hillyer was an American film director and screenwriter. Biography Lambert Harwood Hillyer was born July 8, 1893, in Tyner, Indiana. His mother was character actress Lydia Knott. A graduate of Drake College, he worked as a newspaper reporter and an actor in vaudeville and stock theater. During World War I he began working in motion pictures and became a prolific director and screenwriter, working on many silent-era Westerns by William S. Hart, Buck Jones, Tom Mix and others.
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Fred Kelsey
1884 - 1961 (77 years)
Frederick Alvin Kelsey was an American actor, film director, and screenwriter. Kelsey directed one- and two-reel films for Universal Film Manufacturing Company. He appeared in more than 400 films between 1911 and 1958, often playing policemen or detectives. He also directed 37 films between 1914 and 1920. Kelsey was caricatured as the detective in the 1943 MGM cartoon Who Killed Who? directed by Tex Avery. He was born in Sandusky, Ohio and died at the Motion Picture Country Home in Hollywood, California, aged 77.
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Isaac Wilkinson
1695 - 1784 (89 years)
Isaac Wilkinson was an English industrialist, one of the founders of the iron industry and pioneer of the Industrial Revolution. However, his business ethics were precarious and his commercial affairs frequently chaotic. He became much addicted to litigation.
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George H. Pendleton
1825 - 1889 (64 years)
George Hunt Pendleton was an American politician and lawyer. He represented Ohio in both houses of Congress and was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for Vice President of the United States in 1864.
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Nicolas Mori
1796 - 1839 (43 years)
Nicolas Mori was an Anglo-Italian violinist, music publisher and conductor. Once regarded as the finest violinist in Europe, Mori was somewhat overshadowed by the rise of Paganini. Life Born in London, the son of an Italian wigmaker, he was a child prodigy, performing at the age of 7 at the King's Theatre on 15 March 1804. He was later patronized by the Duke and Duchess of York and the Dukes of Sussex & Cambridge. He studied under Pinto until 1804, then with François Hippolyte Barthélémon and finally with Viotti from 1808 to 1814. He was one of the founders of the Philharmonic Society in 1...
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Donald Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal
1820 - 1914 (94 years)
Donald Alexander Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal , known as Sir Donald A. Smith between May 1886 and August 1897, was a Scottish-born Canadian businessman who became one of the British Empire's foremost builders and philanthropists. He became commissioner, governor and principal shareholder of the Hudson's Bay Company. He was president of the Bank of Montreal and with his first cousin, George Stephen , co-founded the Canadian Pacific Railway. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba and afterwards represented Montreal in the House of Commons of Canada. He was Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom from 1896 to 1914.
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Earl C. Arnold
1884 - 1949 (65 years)
Earl Caspar Arnold was an American academic administrator. He served as the dean of the Vanderbilt University Law School from 1930 to 1945. Early life Arnold was born on 8 June 1884 in Iola, Kansas. He graduated from Baker University in 1906, and he earned a JD from the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in 1909.
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Rob J. De Boer
#1542
Henry MacCracken
1840 - 1918 (78 years)
Henry Mitchell MacCracken was an American educator and academic administrator. Biography Henry MacCracken was born in Oxford, Ohio on September 28, 1840. He graduated from Miami University in Ohio in 1857. After a brief teaching career, he entered the Presbyterian ministry in 1863. From 1881 to 1884 he served as the sixth chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, then called the Western University of Pennsylvania.
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Elizabeth Storrs Mead
1832 - 1917 (85 years)
Elizabeth Storrs Mead was an American educator who was the 9th President of Mount Holyoke College from 1890 - 1900. She taught at Andover Seminary and Oberlin College, before becoming the first non-alumna president of Mount Holyoke.
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Meta Given
1888 - 1981 (93 years)
Meta Hortense Given was an American entrepreneur, nutritionist, home economist, photographer and best-selling cookbook author. Given grew up working on her family's farm in Missouri. There, little variety in foodstuffs were available, and after studying nutrition as an undergraduate at the University of Missouri and at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and she also did undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Chicago, Given grew interested in devising recipes that maximized the culinary and gustatory value of farm staples but minimized the cost to the consumer.
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James Wilson
1805 - 1860 (55 years)
James Wilson was a Scottish businessman, economist, and Liberal politician who founded The Economist weekly and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, which merged with Standard Bank in 1969 to form Standard Chartered. He was the first Finance Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council from December 1859 until his death in August 1860. Sent there to put order into the chaos that followed the "Sepoy Mutiny" of 1857, he presented India's first budget, and was responsible for the government accounting system, Pay Office, and audit, apart from government paper currency, Indian Police, a...
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Winfred E. Wagoner
1888 - 1948 (60 years)
Winfred Ethestal Wagoner was an American educator, best known as the president of Ball State Teachers College, now known as Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana. Biography Wagoner was born in Wallace, Indiana on May 30, 1888. He married Glossie Goddard in 1914.
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William Dick
1793 - 1866 (73 years)
William Dick was a Scottish veterinarian and founder of the Dick Vet School in Edinburgh, the first veterinary college in Scotland. He is responsible for major advances in the field of veterinary science and the profession as a whole.
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John Black
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Sir John Paul Black held several senior positions in the British motor industry including chairman of Standard-Triumph. He was born in Kingston upon Thames on 10 February 1895 the fourth son of Ellen and her husband John George Black, a clerk in the Public Record Office now Britain's national archives. He studied law at the University of London. During the First World War he served first in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve before transferring to the Royal Tank Regiment, where he gained the rank of captain.
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Robert Smalls
1839 - 1915 (76 years)
Robert Smalls was an American politician, publisher, businessman and maritime pilot. Born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, he freed himself, his crew and their families during the American Civil War by commandeering a Confederate transport ship, CSS Planter, in Charleston harbor, on May 13, 1862, and sailing it from the Confederate-controlled waters of the harbor to the U.S. blockade that surrounded it. He then piloted the ship to the Union-controlled enclave in Beaufort–Port Royal–Hilton Head area, where it became a Union warship. His example and persuasion helped convince Presiden...
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Edward Ball
1888 - 1981 (93 years)
Edward Gresham Ball was a businessman who wielded powerful political influence in Florida for decades. Referred to as "a law unto himself", despite the fact that he never held public office and did not own much of the assets he controlled, he led a forest products company, a railroad and owned newspapers. He worked for and with his brother-in-law Alfred I. du Pont for nine years before running the Alfred I. duPont Testamentary Trust's businesses himself for another 46 years. He founded and led the St. Joe Paper Company to become a major player in several industries in Florida. He was a leader...
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