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,
#1551
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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Jack Marshall
1921 - 1973 (52 years)
Jack Wilton Marshall was an American jazz guitarist, composer, arranger, and record producer. He was married to Eva Katherine Pellegrini, and the father to four children, three sons, producer/director Frank Marshall, composer Phil Marshall, Matt Marshall, and a daughter, Sally Marshall. Jack is also the cousin of classical guitarist Christopher Parkening.
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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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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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E. John Russell
1872 - 1965 (93 years)
Sir Edward John Russell was a British soil chemist, agriculture scientist, and director of Rothamsted Experimental Station from 1912 to 1943. He was responsible for hiring R A Fisher for statistical research at Rothamsted and driven by concerns over a lack of international information exchange about agriculture, he initiated the Imperial Agricultural Bureaux, which later became the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux.
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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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Vallabh Sambamurthy
Vallabh Sambamurthy is the Albert O. Nicholas Dean of the Wisconsin School of Business of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Education Vallabh Sambamurthy received his Bachelor of Engineering with honors in mechanical engineering from National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli in 1981. He received his Post Graduate Diploma in Management from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in 1983 and Doctorate of Philosophy degree from Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota.
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Benn Konsynski
Benn Konsynski has been the George S. Craft Distinguished University Professor of Information Systems and Operations Management at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University since 1994. Previously, he spent six years on the faculty at the Harvard Business School, where he taught in the MBA program and several executive programs. He also served as professor at the University of Arizona, where he was a co-founder of the university's multimillion-dollar group decision support laboratory. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University. He did a dissertation on "Computer Aided Logical Applications Software Design" under advisors Jay Frank Nunamaker, Jr.
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Harold W. Dodds
1889 - 1980 (91 years)
Harold Willis Dodds was the fifteenth president of Princeton University from 1933 to 1957. Early life and education Dodds was born on June 28, 1889, in Utica, Pennsylvania, the son of a professor of Bible studies at Grove City College. After receiving his bachelor's degree at Grove City College in 1909 and teaching public school for two years, he received his MA at Princeton in 1914 and his PhD, in political science, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1917. After receiving his PhD, he married Margaret Murray.
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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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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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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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