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 female people in Economics,
#651
Nancy Lou Schwartz
1939 - 1981 (42 years)
Nancy Lou Schwartz was an American economist and professor who researched decision sciences and methods of dynamic optimization. Life and career Nancy L. Schwartz earned her AB at Oberlin College in 1960 and attended graduate school at Purdue University, where she received her MS and PhD . While at Purdue, one of her classmates was fellow economist Morton I. Kamien with whom she would publish many academic works.
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Shirley Montag Almon
1935 - 1975 (40 years)
Shirley Montag Almon was an American economist noted for the Almon Lag. Early life and education Almon was born on February 6, 1935, in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, the oldest of seven children of Harold and Dorothea Montag. She was educated at Goucher College, Baltimore, and then for her PhD at Harvard University . A core element of her PhD was published in Econometrica and introduced the now famous technique for estimating distributed lags.
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Helen Sumner Woodbury
1876 - 1933 (57 years)
Helen Laura Sumner Woodbury was an American economist, academic, historian and public official. Biography Woodbury was born Helen Laura Sumner on 12 March 1876 to the district attorney and later Colorado judge George True Sumner and Katherine Eudora Marsh in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Woodbury attended Wellesley College where she got her undergraduate degree in 1898 before going on to be one of the first women to earn a PhD in economics, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1908 with her thesis, "The Labor Movement in America, 1827–1837" Woodbury was influenced by her professors, including Katharine Coman and Emily Greene Balch in her undergraduate years as well as Richard T.
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Maria Smith-Falkner
1878 - 1968 (90 years)
Maria Natanovna Smith-Falkner was a Soviet economist, statistician and a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1939 onwards. She was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, having joined the Bolsheviks in 1918.
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Theresa McMahon
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Theresa Schmid McMahon was an American economist, political scientist, author, and activist. She earned her PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin. She taught in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington for 26 years.
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Elli Saurio
1899 - 1966 (67 years)
Elli Saurio was a Finnish economist. She was the first professor of household economics in Europe, the first woman in Finland to hold a doctorate in economics, and the first female professor in the University of Helsinki Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry.
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Ruth Allen
1889 - 1979 (90 years)
Ruth Alice Allen was an American economist and academic who specialized in institutional economics. Personal life and education Allen was born on July 28, 1889, in Cameron, Texas, and earned her B.A. degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1921 and her M.A. from the same university two years later. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1931. Her doctoral advisor was Harry A. Millis and her dissertation committee included Frank Knight and Paul Douglas.
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Faith M. Williams
1893 - 1958 (65 years)
Faith Moors Williams was an American economist who became Director of the Office of Foreign Labor Conditions in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Williams graduated from Wellesley College in 1915, and earned a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1924. Her doctoral dissertation was The Food Manufacturing Industries in New York and its Environs: Present Trends and Probable Future Developments. She then worked on rural nutrition as an assistant professor in the College of Home Economics at Cornell University, and assisted with the economic components of the Middletown studies.
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Kate Claghorn
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Kate Holladay Claghorn was an American sociologist, economist, statistician, legal scholar, and Progressive Era activist, who became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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Grace Raymond Hebard
1861 - 1936 (75 years)
Grace Raymond Hebard was an American historian, suffragist, scholar, writer, political economist, and noted University of Wyoming educator. Hebard's standing as a historian in part rose from her years trekking Wyoming's high plains and mountains seeking first-hand accounts of Wyoming's early pioneers. Today, her books on Wyoming history are sometimes challenged due to her romanticization of the Old West, spurring questions regarding accuracy of her research findings. In particular, her conclusion after decades of field research that Sacajawea was buried in Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reserva...
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Emily Greene Balch
1867 - 1961 (94 years)
Emily Greene Balch was an American economist, sociologist and pacifist. Balch combined an academic career at Wellesley College with a long-standing interest in social issues such as poverty, child labor, and immigration, as well as settlement work to uplift poor immigrants and reduce juvenile delinquency.
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Nancy Rose
Nancy Rose is an American economist, currently the Charles P. Kindleberger Professor and Head of the Department of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2014 to 2017, Rose served as the deputy assistant attorney general for economic analysis in the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice. Her research in the fields of industrial organization and the economics of regulation has covered a variety of industries, including airlines, electric utilities, and trucking.
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Eveline M. Burns
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Eveline Mabel Richardson Burns was an American economist, writer and instructor. Born Eveline Mabel Richardson in London, England, she was the only child of Eveline Maud Falkner and Frederick Haig Richardson. Her mother died following her birth, so her father remarried and had three more children. Eveline attended Seatham Secondary School, then entered the London School of Economics at age 16 and graduated in 1920, earning a B.S. with first class honors. In 1922 she married the economist Arthur Robert Burns and the couple emigrated to the United States. After the award of her Ph.D. in 1926, she gained a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fellowship.
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Vera Lutz
1912 - 1976 (64 years)
Vera Constance Lutz, , was a British economist. She was married to the German economist Friedrich Lutz. Career Smith was born in Kent, England, and studied at the London School of Economics between 1930 and 1935 for a PhD. In 1937, she married German economist Friedrich Lutz, and the couple moved to Princeton University prior to the start of the Second World War, and moved to Zurich in 1951. Lutz's main areas of study were credit theory, economic development theory and labour economics. Vera and Friedrich's 1951 work Theory of Investment of the Firm was said to have "greatly influenced modern capital theory, and would remain a major source of reference for the next decade".
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Clara Eliot
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Clara Eliot was an economist known for her work in consumer economics. She taught economics at Barnard College for many years. Biography Eliot was born in 1896, the granddaughter of Thomas Lamb Eliot and part of a prominent Unitarian branch of the Eliot family. She did her undergraduate studies at Reed College, which her grandfather had founded, graduating in 1917. She taught at Mills College from 1917 to 1918, and then worked as an assistant to Yale economist Irving Fisher from 1918 to 1920. She also worked as an elementary school teacher; one of her students from this time, Margaret E. Mart...
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Persia Campbell
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Persia Gwendoline Crawford Campbell was an Australian-born American economist who championed consumer rights worldwide. Early life Persia Crawford Campbell, was born March 15, 1898, at Nerrigundah, New South Wales. She was the daughter of school teachers, Rodolfe Archibald Clarence Campbell and his second wife Beatrice Hunt. Persia was educated in Sydney at Fort Street Girls' High School before going on to university, where she took her B.A from the University of Sydney in 1918, followed by her M.A. in 1920. She had obtained first-class honours in history.
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Joan Robinson
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Joan Violet Robinson was a British economist known for her wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. One of the most prominent economists of the century, Joan Robinson incarnated the "Cambridge School" in most of its guises in the 20th century: she started as a cutting-edge Marshallian and after 1936; as one of the earliest and most ardent Keynesians and finally as one of the leaders of the Neo-Ricardian and Post Keynesian schools. Robinson's contributions to economics are far too numerous to elucidate fairly. Unlike most economists, she was not a "one idea" person, but rather made many many fundamental contributions to very different areas of economics.
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Mary Paley Marshall
1850 - 1944 (94 years)
Mary Marshall was an economist who in 1874 had been one of the first women to take the Tripos examination at Cambridge University – although, as a woman, she had been excluded from receiving a degree. She was one of a group of five women who were the first to be admitted to study at Newnham College, the second women's college to be founded at the University.
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Beatrice Webb
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, was an English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer. It was Webb who coined the term "collective bargaining". She was among the founders of the London School of Economics and played a crucial role in forming the Fabian Society.
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Vera Anstey
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
Vera Anstey was a British economist and noted expert on the economy of India. Anstey is most closely associated with the London School of Economics where she served as a lecturer and chaired the admissions committee, and with the wider University of London where she served as dean of the faculty of economics.
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Alzada Comstock
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Alzada Peckham Comstock was an economist who taught at Mount Holyoke College. She became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1926. Early life and education Comstock was born in Waterford, Connecticut. She earned a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 1910, followed by a master's degree from Columbia University in 1913. In 1921, she completed a Ph.D. at Columbia University.
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Joyce P. Jacobsen
1900 - Present (126 years)
Joyce Penelope Jacobsen is a former President of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Dr. Jacobsen was elected as the 29th President of Hobart College and the 18th President of William Smith College. Jacobsen is a scholar of economics, an award-winning teacher and an experienced administrator. She began her presidency on July 1, 2019. She is the first woman to serve as president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
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Margaret G. Reid
1896 - 1991 (95 years)
Margaret Gilpin Reid was an economist in the area of household production, housework and non-market activities. Life Margaret Gilpin Reid was born in 1896 in Cardale, Manitoba in Canada, and completed a degree in Home Economics at the University of Manitoba in 1921. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1931 titled The Economics of Household Production. She taught at Connecticut College, Iowa State College and later the University of Chicago, where she received tenure as a Professor of Home Economics and Economics. She became emeritus in 1961.
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