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.
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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
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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Helene Reynard
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
Helene Reynard or Helene Reinherz was a United Kingdom economist and college administrator. She created as a separate entity King's College of Household and Social Science in London and then ran it.
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Marion Parris Smith
1879 - Present (147 years)
Marion Parris Smith was a professor of economics at Bryn Mawr College. Biography She was born as Marion Parris on 22 May 1879 in Manhattan to Edward Lowden Parris and Mary Ida Dubois She married William Roy Smith on 11 June 1912 in Manhattan, New York.
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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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Elizabeth Baker
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
Elizabeth Faulkner Baker was an American economist and academic who specialized in scientific management and the relationship between employment and technological change, especially the role of women.
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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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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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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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Katharine Coman
1857 - 1915 (58 years)
Katharine Ellis Coman was an American social activist and professor. She was based at the women-only Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where she created new courses in political economy, in line with her personal belief in social change. As dean, she established a new department of economics and sociology.
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Edith Abbott
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Edith Abbott was an American economist, statistician, social worker, educator, and author. Abbott was born in Grand Island, Nebraska. Abbott was a pioneer in the profession of social work with an educational background in economics. She was a leading activist in social reform with the ideals that humanitarianism needed to be embedded in education. Abbott was also in charge of implementing social work studies to the graduate level. Though she was met with resistance on her work with social reform at the University of Chicago, she ultimately was successful and was elected as the school's dean in 1924, making her one of the first female deans in the United States.
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Hazel Kyrk
1886 - 1957 (71 years)
Hazel Kyrk was an American economist and pioneer of consumer economics. Early life and education Hazel Kyrk was born in 1886 in Ashley, Ohio and was the only child of Elmer Kyrk, a drayman, and Jane Kyrk, a homemaker.
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Lillian Penson
1896 - 1963 (67 years)
Dame Lillian Margery Penson, DBE was a professor of modern history at the University of London, and the first woman to serve as Vice-Chancellor of the university. Early life She was born in Islington, London, the eldest daughter of a wholesale dairy manager. She was educated privately and then first attended Birkbeck College and then University College, London where she graduated BA in 1917 with a first and in 1921 one of the earliest PhDs.
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Beth Hayes
1955 - 1984 (29 years)
Beth Hayes was an American economist specializing in theoretical microeconomics. She has been memorialized by an award established by the University of Pennsylvania. Educational background Hayes graduated from the honors program at the University of Michigan in 1977 and received her Ph.D. in Economics in 1982 from the University of Pennsylvania, studying under David Cass. Her dissertation, Three Essays in Microeconomic Theory, formed the basis for her foundational work in research on two-part tariffs and asymmetrical information, and insurance contracts.
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Mabel Newcomer
1891 - 1983 (92 years)
Mabel Newcomer was an economics professor at Vassar College from 1917 to 1957. She also taught courses in finance and corporations. Newcomer was known among the Vassar economics department as the best "tax man" during her time there.
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Elisha Pazner
1941 - 1979 (38 years)
Elisha Aryeh Pazner was an Israeli economic- and game theorist with important contributions in the theory of welfare economics and fair division. He was a member of the Department of Economics at Tel-Aviv University from 1971 until his death. During this time he spent over two years as a visiting professor at Northwestern University.
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Susan Myra Kingsbury
1870 - 1949 (79 years)
Susan Myra Kingsbury was an American professor of economics and a pioneer of social research. Biography Susan was born in San Pablo, California, in 1870, the daughter of Willard Belmont Kingsbury, M.D., and Helen Shuler née DeLamater, and was raised in Stockton, California. Her father died when she was six, leaving Helen to raise Susan and her brother. Helen was dean of women at the College of the Pacific, where Susan would matriculate then graduate with honors in 1890. From 1892 to 1900 she was a history teacher at Lowell High School in San Francisco, while tending to her ailing mother. She graduated with an A.M.
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Eleanor Lansing Dulles
1895 - 1996 (101 years)
Eleanor Lansing Dulles was an American writer, professor, and United States government employee. Her background in economics and her familiarity with European affairs enabled her to fill a number of important State Department positions.
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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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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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