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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List of the most influential people in Economics,
#5001
Franklin Henry Giddings
1855 - 1931 (76 years)
Franklin Henry Giddings was an American sociologist and economist. Biography Giddings was born at Sherman, Connecticut. He graduated from Union College . For ten years he wrote items for the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican and the Daily Union. In 1888 he was appointed lecturer in political science at Bryn Mawr College; in 1894 he became professor of sociology at Columbia University. From 1892 to 1905 he was a vice president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
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William Petty
1623 - 1687 (64 years)
Sir William Petty FRS was an English economist, physician, scientist and philosopher. He first became prominent serving Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth in Ireland. He developed efficient methods to survey the land that was to be confiscated and given to Cromwell's soldiers. He also remained a significant figure under King Charles II and King James II, as did many others who had served Cromwell.
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Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil
1813 - 1892 (79 years)
Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil /ʒɑ̃ɡusˈtav kuʁˈsɛl səˈnœj/ was a French economist. He is considered to be the founder of classical economics and economic liberalism in Chile. Early life and education Courcelle-Seneuil was born at Senouillac on 22 December 1813. He attended Royal College of Poitiers at University of Poitiers and later University of Paris, where he received a law degree in 1835.
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Earl C. Crockett
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Earl Clarkson Crockett was an American economist who served as acting president of Brigham Young University from 1963 to 1964 while Ernest L. Wilkinson was running for the United States Senate. Prior to this Crockett has been BYU's academic vice president.
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Orlando Letelier
1932 - 1976 (44 years)
Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar was a Chilean economist, politician and diplomat during the presidency of Salvador Allende. A refugee from the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, Letelier accepted several academic positions in Washington, D.C. following his exile from Chile. In 1976, agents of Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional , the Pinochet regime's secret police, assassinated Letelier in Washington via the use of a car bomb. These agents had been working in collaboration with members of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, an anti-Castro militant group.
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Albert J. Meyer
1919 - 1983 (64 years)
Albert Julius Meyer was an American economist who taught at Harvard University for 28 years. Meyers specialized in the economies of south-west Asia. Meyer was born in Hawarden, Iowa. obtained his bachelors and master's degrees at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1947 he received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Among his seminal papers was "Entrepreneurship the missing link in the Arab states?" In 1955, he started teaching at Harvard. While at Harvard he produced two major books:Middle Eastern Capitalism: Nine essays andThe Economy of Cyprus Myers was chief of mission for the Special U.S.
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Hendrick Peter Godfried Quack
1834 - 1917 (83 years)
Hendrick Peter Godfried Quack was a Dutch legal scholar, economist and historian, who is best known for his work De socialisten: Personen en stelsels . Biography Quack, born in Zetten to a beer brewer and his wife, commenced studies at Utrecht in 1853, followed by law studies at the Amsterdam Athenaeum Illustre. In Amsterdam, he attended lectures by Jeronimo de Bosch Kemper and Martinus des Amorie van der Hoeven, both Christian critics of liberalism. Following the example of his professors, Quack became convinced that liberalism could not address the social problems of his day. He submitted a...
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Charles Franklin Dunbar
1830 - 1900 (70 years)
Charles Franklin Dunbar was an American economist. He held the first Chair of Political Economy at the Harvard University in 1871. Biography Charles Franklin Dunbar was born in Abington, Massachusetts on July 28, 1830. He graduated from Harvard University in 1851. From 1885 to 1898 he served as a trustee and later as president of the Board of Trustees of Phillips Exeter Academy.
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K. C. Hsiao
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
K. C. Hsiao was a Chinese historian and political scientist, best known for his contributions to Chinese political science and history. Life and career Hsiao first travelled to the United States in 1920 on the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, remaining there for six years and earning a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1926. He returned to China and was professor of political science at Yenching University from 1930 to 1932, then at Tsinghua University from 1932 to 1937. With the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, he left to teach at Sichuan University and Kwang Hua University.
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Edwin Kuh
1925 - 1986 (61 years)
Edwin Kuh was an American economist. He was a faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management for over 30 years, and was widely known for his work with econometric models to forecast production, savings, investment, business cycle, unemployment, and related functions. John Kenneth Galbraith called him "one of the most innovative economists of his generation."
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Samuel Bailey
1791 - 1870 (79 years)
Samuel Bailey was a British philosopher, economist and writer. He was called the "Bentham of Hallamshire". Life Bailey was born at Sheffield on 5 July 1791, the son of Joseph Bailey and Mary Eadon. His father was among the first of those Sheffield merchants who went to the United States to establish trade connections. After a few years in his father's business, he retired from all business concerns with an ample fortune, although he remained connected with the Sheffield Banking Company, of which he was a founder in 1831 and served as chairman for many years. Although an ardent liberal, he took little part in political affairs.
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Julius Herman Boeke
1884 - 1956 (72 years)
Julius Herman Boeke was a Dutch economist and lawyer. He was a professor of Dutch Constitutional Law at Leiden University, where he lectured and published works on the subject of the economy of the Dutch East Indies.
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Edward Ronald Walker
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Sir Edward Ronald Walker was an Australian diplomat and economist who served as Australia's Permanent Representative to the United Nations and Ambassador to Germany, Japan, and France. Early life and education Walker was born on 26 January 1907 in Cobar, New South Wales the, eldest child of Frederick Thomas Walker, a Methodist minister, and Mary Melvina Annie Walker, née King. Born into a prominent family in the Methodist movement, Walker's mother was also the daughter of a Methodist minister and his paternal cousin was the Methodist minister and social activist Sir Alan Walker. Nevertheles...
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Lazarus Aaronson
1894 - 1966 (72 years)
Lazarus Leonard Aaronson , often referred to as L. Aaronson, was a British poet and a lecturer in economics. As a young man, he belonged to a group of Jewish friends who are today known as the Whitechapel Boys, many of whom later achieved fame as writers and artists. Though less radical in his use of language, he has been compared to his more renowned Whitechapel friend, Isaac Rosenberg, in terms of diction and verbal energy. Aaronson's poetry is characterised more as 'post-Georgian' than modernistic, and reviewers have since been able to trace influences back to both the English poet John Ke...
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John Bovingdon
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
John Bovingdon was a modern dancer-turned-economic analyst who performed regularly at the Kings Road House of architect R.M. Schindler in Los Angeles in the 1920s. He studied economics at Harvard and graduated with high honors in 1915. After graduation, he moved to Japan and worked as a professor of economics at Keio University until 1920. He was fired from his post at the Office of Economic Warfare in 1943 following "publication of assertions that Bovingdon used to be a ballet dancer and once had Communist associations."
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Kenneth K. Kurihara
1910 - 1972 (62 years)
Kenneth Kenkichi Kurihara was a distinguished professor of economic theory at the State University of New York. He was a noted post-Keynesian economist who worked on Keynesian dynamics, growth, development economics and monetary theory and public policy. He was born in Kutchan, Hokkaido Japan but moved to the US where he worked first for the government as a research economist, then as an academic at Princeton University, Rutgers University and then at the State University of New York.
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Robert Aaron Gordon
1908 - 1978 (70 years)
Robert Aaron Gordon was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley from 1938 to 1976. In 1975, he served as president of the American Economic Association.
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John Jewkes
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
John Jewkes was a British classical liberal economist. He was Professor of Economic Organisation at Merton College, Oxford. His main work, Ordeal by Planning, was written in 1946 and argued that the central planning implemented in the United Kingdom during World War II will lead to poverty if it is adopted as a permanent economic system, a thesis quite similar to the one developed by Friedrich Hayek in 1945 in The Road to Serfdom. His line of thought was close to the ordoliberal thesis of Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken.
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Emory Richard Johnson
1864 - 1950 (86 years)
Emory Richard Johnson was a United States economist who specialized in transportation issues. Biography Johnson was born in Waupun, Wisconsin. He studied at University of Wisconsin and University of Pennsylvania . He was instructor of economics at Haverford College 1893-96. He became professor of transportation and commerce at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896, and was dean of its Wharton School from 1919 to 1933. He served as expert on transportation on the United States Industrial Commission, and was a member on valuation of railway property for the United States Census Bureau , and as expert on traffic on the National Waterways Commission of 1909.
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Leon C. Marshall
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Leon Carroll Marshall was an American economist, Professor of Political Economy and fourth dean of the Booth School of Business from 1909 to 1924, Professor at the Law School of the Johns Hopkins University, and Professor at the American University. He is known for his works on our economic organization, business administration, curriculum-making in the social studies and the divorce court.
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Allan Flanders
1910 - 1973 (63 years)
Allan Flanders was a British academic, author, and founding member of the Oxford School of Industrial Relations, along with Hugh Clegg, Alan Fox, Lord William McCarthy, Sir George Bain and Otto Kahn-Freund. The school was a developer of the idea of collective bargaining and overall proponents of bargaining power, legal contracts, normative regulation and institutionalized conflict resolutions as issues of significance and focus in the field of industrial relations.
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John Elliott Cairnes
1823 - 1875 (52 years)
John Elliott Cairnes was an Irish political economist. He has been described as the "last of the classical economists". Biography John Cairnes was born at Castlebellingham, County Louth. He was the son of William Elliott Cairnes of Stameen, near Drogheda, and Marianne Woolsey, whose mother was the sister of Sir William Bellingham, 1st Baronet of Castlebellingham. John's father decided upon a business career, against the wishes of his mother , and became a partner in the Woolsey Brewery at Castlebellingham. In 1825, William Cairnes started on his own account in Drogheda, making the Drogheda Brewery an unqualified success.
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D. H. MacGregor
1877 - 1953 (76 years)
David Hutchison MacGregor was a Scottish economist and Drummond Professor of Political Economy at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, from 1921 to 1945. Early life He was born in Monifieth in Angus, the third child of the Rev Robert MacGregor minister of the Free Church of Scotland, and his wife, Lillias Hannah Hutchison .
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Alain Combes
#5025
Lewis Cecil Gray
1881 - 1952 (71 years)
Lewis Cecil Gray was an American agricultural economist. A prolific author of economic texts, his career included several academic posts and various federal government roles. His monumental History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 is considered a major contribution to economic history and agricultural economics. Gray held key positions in New Deal programs designed to alleviate land use problems arising from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.
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Richard Ehrenberg
1857 - 1921 (64 years)
Richard Ehrenberg was a German economist. He taught at Rostock University from 1899 to 1921. Literary works Hamburg und Antwerpen seit 300 Jahren, 1889Hamburg und England im Zeitalter der Königin Elisabeth, 1896Das Zeitalter der Fugger, 2 Vols., 1896, -- an English translation is also available: Richard Ehrenberg, Capital & Finance in the Age of the Renaissance: A Study of the Fuggers and Their Connections, 1928, reprinted 1985Das Familie in ihrer Bedeutung für das Volksleben, 1916
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Elizabeth Brunner
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Elizabeth Brunner was a British economist, best known for her work in industrial economics with Philip Andrews. Brunner was partly responsible for "the resuscitation of industrial economics", giving the subject a new theoretical basis by defining an industry, as separate from a market, based on a group of firms with similar processes of production. Together with Andrews she made several contributions to business history: Capital Development in Steel , The Eagle Ironworkers, Oxford and, their biography of British industrialist, The Life of Lord Nuffield . Her clear style and disciplined approach contributed a lot to their joint work.
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Gheorghe Zane
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Gheorghe Zane was a Romanian economist and historian. Born in Galați, he attended Vasile Alecsandri National College before enrolling in the law faculty of the University of Iași. He graduated from that institution in 1920, earning a doctorate from the University of Bucharest in 1923. His first teaching job, from 1921 to 1924, was at the agriculture faculty in Iași, where his courses dealt with political economy. Securing a post as associate professor in the same subject at the Iași law faculty in 1924, he advanced to full professor in 1929, teaching the history of economic doctrines. The following year, he switched to teaching political economy and finance, continuing to do so until 1945.
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Walter W. Stewart
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Walter W. Stewart was an American economist and banking expert. He was an economics advisor to four presidents, Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt and Eisenhower. Education and career Stewart graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Missouri in 1909. He was a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, the University of Michigan and Amherst College. He joined the faculty of the School of Economics and Politics at the Institute for Advanced Study on September 1, 1938, and remained there until his death in 1958.
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Liston Pope
1909 - 1974 (65 years)
Liston Corlando Pope was an American clergyman, author, theological educator, and dean of Yale University Divinity School from 1949 to 1962. Early life Pope was born in Thomasville, North Carolina, the son of Robie Lester Pope and his wife, née Dora Vivian Younts. Robie Pope was a banker, a city councilman andmayor of Thomasville, and had served in the North Carolina House of Representatives. Liston Pope considered his father to be a "banker with a conscience" and an inspiration in his study of social problems from the Christian point of view.
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Joseph French Johnson
1853 - 1925 (72 years)
Joseph French Johnson was an American economist, journalist, Professor, and Dean of the School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance, New York University, and founding Dean of the Alexander Hamilton Institute in New York in 1909.
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Martha Steffy Browne
1898 - 1990 (92 years)
Martha Steffy Browne was an Austrian American economist. A student of Ludwig von Mises, she earned a doctorate in political economy in 1921 from the University of Vienna, one of the first women to do so. Of Jewish descent, Browne emigrated to the United States in 1939, later becoming a professor of economics at Brooklyn College .
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Johann Friedrich von Pfeiffer
1718 - 1787 (69 years)
Johann Friedrich von Pfeiffer was one of the most important German figures of political economy of the 18th century along with Philipp von Hörnigk and Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi. He was a leading practitioner in Cameralism and mercantilism.
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May Louise Cowles
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
May Louise Cowles was an American economist, researcher, author, and advocate of Home Economics. She was a member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1915 to 1958. She had many submissions published in the Journal of Home Economics, the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, and Rural Sociology. She also produced several widely read pamphlets, including Meeting Housing Needs of Older People in Rural Areas , and spoke at a string of national seminars to encourage the addition of family economics to home economics instruction across the United States.
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James A. Field
1880 - 1927 (47 years)
James Alfred Field was an American economist and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Chicago, known as one of the proponents of institutional economics and as demographer, who contributed to the theory of population and its history.
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Larry Neal
1937 - 1981 (44 years)
Larry Neal or Lawrence Neal was a scholar of African-American theatre. He is well known for his contributions to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a major influence in pushing for black culture to focus less on integration with White culture, to that of celebrating their differences within an equally important and meaningful artistic and political field, thus celebrating Black Heritage.
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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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Johan Henrik Åkerman
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Johan Henrik Åkerman was a Swedish economist and was a Professor of Economics and Statistics at Lund University. He was the younger brother to Swedish economist Johan Gustav Åkerman. He got an MBA at Stockholm School of Economics 1918. He then studied at Harvard University 1919-1920, and again in Sweden, he studied among other statistics in the Universities in Uppsala and Lund. He became PhD in 1929 with the thesis about the economic life rhythm which was the first Swedish dissertation that contained elements of econometrics.
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Joseph Hiam Levy
1838 - 1913 (75 years)
Joseph Hiam Levy was an English author and economist. He was educated at the City of London School and joined the Civil Service. He later became a lecturer in economics at Birkbeck College and an important figure in the Personal Rights Association.
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Sidney Weintraub
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Sidney Weintraub was an American economist, one of the most prominent American members of the Post Keynesian economics school. He was the co-founder and co-editor of The Journal of Post Keynesian Economics . His views included criticism of monetarism and the neoclassical synthesis, and promotion of the tax-based incomes policy .
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James Wilke Nisbet
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
James Wilkie Nisbet was a Scottish economist. He gained a double first in economic science and philosophy, and an LLB with distinction at the University of Glasgow. Between 1926 and 1931 he served as assistant to W. R. Scott, the Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow.
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Fang Zong'ao
1884 - 1950 (66 years)
Fang Zong'ao was a late Qing dynasty scholar; a well known economist and jurist in the early Republic of China era, and a professor in economics and law. Fang was born in Puning, Guangdong Province, China, in 1884. In 1903, Fang went to for study. In 1905, Fang returned to his home town Puning after he graduated from the college and established a teachers' college in Puning. In 1908, Fang was granted a scholarship from Qing dynasty government and went to Japan again for his studies. After graduating from Yamaguchi Business School in Yamaguchi Prefecture Fang was admitted to Meiji University.
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Eduard Heimann
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
Eduard Magnus Mortier Heimann was a German economist and social scientist who advocated ethical socialist programs in Germany in the 1920s and later in the United States. He was hostile to capitalism but thought it was possible to combine the advantages of a market economy with those of socialism through competing economic units governed by strong state controls.
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Edward C. Harwood
1900 - 1980 (80 years)
Edward Crosby Harwood was an economist, philosopher of science, and investment advisor who is most known for founding the nonprofit American Institute for Economic Research in 1933, which survives today in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. AIER is a scientific research organization specialized in economics. It is one of the oldest nonprofit research organizations in the U.S. It is the parent of a for-profit subsidiary, American Investment Services, Inc.
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Adam Contzen
1571 - 1635 (64 years)
Adam Contzen was a German Jesuit economist and exegete. Contzen was born in 1573, or, according to Carlos Sommervogel, in 1575. Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz gives the 1571 date listed above. Contzen entered the Society of Jesus at Trier in 1595. He was professor of philosophy in the University of Würzburg in 1606, and was transferred to the University of Mainz in 1610, where he occupied the chair of Holy Scripture for more than ten years. He had a share in the organization of the University of Molsheim, in Alsace, of which he was chancellor in 1622-23.
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Lev Kritzman
1890 - 1938 (48 years)
Lev Natanovich Kritzman was a Soviet Marxian economist who became a prominent advocate of state planning in the 1920s Soviet economy. However after 1929, his views on agricultural reform were aligned with mass collectivisation and dekulakization introduced by Joseph Stalin.
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László Radványi
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
László Radványi , also known as Johann Lorenz Schmidt, was a Hungarian-German writer and academic. Life Childhood and early career Radványi was born into a Jewish family in Hungary. As a boy, Radványi attended a grammar school on Marko Street in Budapest. While attending grammar school, at the age of 16, he authored a book of poetry, which received a preface from Frigyes Karinthy. Radványi studied economics and philosophy at the University of Budapest from 1918 to 1919, where he became involved in radical politics. With the destruction of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 he fled to Vienn...
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Kunio Maruyama
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Kunio Maruyama was a Japanese businessman, adventurer, and college professor of English and economics. He was one of the three Japanese men who were secretly sent from Xinjing's Japanese Society, that led to the successful repatriation of most of the 1.6 million Japanese who had been trapped in the former Manchukuo at the end of World War II.
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Sedley Cudmore
1878 - 1945 (67 years)
Sedley Anthony Cudmore was a Canadian economist, academic, civil servant and Canada's second Dominion Statistician. Early years Cudmore was born in County Cork, Ireland. At age 9 he and his family immigrated to Canada.
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Sidney Sherwood
1860 - 1901 (41 years)
Sidney Sherwood was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University from 1892 to 1901, where he succeeded his teacher Richard T. Ely who had left for the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as head of the political economy program. Although a student of Ely's, Sherwood was one of the early American Marginalists.
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