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
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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