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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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