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
Robert von Ostertag
1864 - 1940 (76 years)
Robert von Ostertag was a German veterinarian who was a native of Schwäbisch Gmünd. He studied medicine in Berlin and veterinary medicine in Stuttgart, afterwards becoming a professor of hygiene at Tierärztliche Hochschule Stuttgart and at the College of Veterinary Medicine in Berlin . In 1907 he became head of the veterinary department in the Reich Health Office in Berlin. In 1910 he traveled to German Southwest Africa in order to study diseases of sheep, and in 1913 he investigated rinderpest in German East Africa. In 1920 he became head of veterinary services in Germany.
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Toshiwo Doko
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Toshiwo Doko was a Japanese engineer born in Mitsu District, Okayama, Manager, President and Chairman of Ishikawajima Heavy Industry and Toshiba. Background Dokō was a key manager in the Japanese economic miracle after World War II, in particular, from 1974 to 1980 when he helmed the Toshiba Corporation and was appointed chairman of the Japan Business Federation .
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Hubert Marischka
1882 - 1959 (77 years)
Hubert Marischka , brother of Ernst Marischka, was an Austrian operetta tenor, actor, film director and screenwriter. Career Marischka was born in Brunn am Gebirge, the son of Jiří Marischka, a supplier to the court of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and his wife Bertha. Hubert began work as a joiner but trained as a singer and in 1904 began a new career in operetta in the town theatre of St. Pölten in Der arme Jonathan by Karl Millöcker. He had his first success as a singer in Brno in 1906, as Danilo in Die lustige Witwe. On 27 July 1907 he sang at the premiere of the Der fidele Bauer by Leo ...
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Joseph Welles Henderson
1890 - 1957 (67 years)
Joseph Welles Henderson , born in Montgomery, Pennsylvania, was acting president of Bucknell University from 1953 to 1954. Education Henderson received his A.B. and master's degrees from Bucknell, and his law degree from Harvard Law School .
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Henry Minor Faser
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Henry Minor Faser was an American academic administrator, life insurance business executive and political activist. He was the founding dean of the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy, the vice president of the Lamar Life Insurance Company, and a supporter of the States' Rights Democratic Party's 1948 presidential campaign.
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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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Mac McMeekan
1908 - 1972 (64 years)
Campbell Percy "Mac" McMeekan was a New Zealand university professor, agricultural scientist and administrator. McMeekan was born in Otaki, New Zealand, in 1908. He received his secondary education at Midhirst School and then at New Plymouth Boys' High School. He had further training at Stratford Technical High School before starting at Victoria University College in agriculture in 1927. After a merger, he continued at the newly-formed Massey Agricultural College in Palmerston North from the following year, from where he graduated in 1932. He remained as a lecturer at Massey and then did further study at the University of Cambridge where he gained his PhD.
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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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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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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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Sydney Harland
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Sydney Cross Harland was a British agricultural botanist with considerable international experience. His area of expertise was especially in the growing of cotton. Early life and education Sydney Cross Harland was born in Snainton in Yorkshire on 19 June 1891, the son of Erasmus Harland and his wife Eliza. He was educated at the municipal secondary school in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.
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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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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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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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