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
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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Karl Diehl
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Karl Diehl was a German economist and professor who taught from 1908 until his death in Freiburg. He taught at the universities of Heidelberg and Freiburg, known for teaching on the subject of Anarchism.
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Ewald Bosse
1880 - 1956 (76 years)
Ewald Theodor Alfred Bosse was a Swedish-Norwegian sociologist and economist. He was born in Stockholm as a son of bookseller and publisher Johan Heinrich Wilhelm Bosse and Anne-Marie Lehmann . He was a brother of Alma Fahlstrøm and Harriet Bosse. He took the doctorate in Kiel in 1914 on the thesis Norwegens Stellung im internationalen Wirtschaftsleben vom 16. Jarhundert bis zur Gegenwart. He was a professor in Kiel from 1920 to 1926 and 1948 to his death. He died in September 1956 in Oslo.
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Charles F. Marsh
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Charles Franklin Marsh was an American economist and academic who became the seventh president of Wofford College on September 1, 1958, and served until his retirement in 1968. A 1925 graduate of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, he earned the Master of Arts from the University of Illinois in 1926, and the Ph.D. from Illinois in 1928. He was a faculty member at American University, and from 1930 to 1958, a professor of economics at the College of William and Mary. In his last six years at William and Mary, he was Dean of the Faculty. He was involved in civic affairs in Williamsburg, serving on several economic planning agencies.
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Gasparo Scaruffi
1519 - 1584 (65 years)
Gasparo Scaruffi , from Reggio Emilia was an Italian economist who proposed a universal currency in order to facilitate an open, objective and just economic system, which, he argued, was the essential foundation of a just society.
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Abul Fazal Atwar Husain
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Abul Fazal Atwar Husain was a Bangladeshi economist. Early life Husain was born on 21 August 1918 in Noakhali, Noakhali District, East Bengal, British India. His father was from Bogra and was in Noakhali working as the deputy magistrate. He graduated from Noakhali Zilla School and then Dhaka College. He graduated from Dhaka University with a double major in economics and political science. He moved to London in 1938. He studied at the London School of Economics, finished another undergrad degree and a master's degree, and graduated in 1943. He worked as an extended lecturer at the India House...
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Frederic George Young
1858 - 1929 (71 years)
Frederic George Young was an educator in the U.S. state of Oregon. He was born in Burnett, Wisconsin on June 3, 1858, and after graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1886, he taught in Wisconsin and South Dakota. He moved to Portland in 1890, and served as principal at its high school and as president of Albany College before being appointed professor of economics and history at the University of Oregon in 1895. He was a founding officer of the Oregon Historical Society in 1898, and as editor of its Oregon Historical Quarterly from its founding in 1900 through the December 1928 issue. He served on the Oregon Commission for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.
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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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Garfield V. Cox
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Garfield Vestal Cox was a leading authority on business fluctuations and forecasting. He was one of the first people to study the performance of experts versus novices in forecasting stock prices. He was also the Dean of the University of Chicago School of Business.
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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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William Amasa Scott
1862 - 1944 (82 years)
William Amasa Scott was an American economist and one of the leading representatives of the marginalist school. He received his B.A. from the University of Rochester in 1886, and his PhD under supervision of Richard T. Ely from Johns Hopkins University in 1892. Scott was a professor of Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1931, and a contributor to John Kells Ingram’s A History of Political Economy.
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Bernhard Steinberger
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Bernhard Steinberger was a German engineer and economist. After 1945 he became an East German political dissident and / or victim, spending most of the period between 1949 and 1960 in prisons and labour camps. He had, by this time, already spent the war years accommodated in a succession of "emigrants' camps" in Switzerland, where he had arrived from Milan with his mother and sister in 1938 in order to escape the effects of newly introduced antisemitic legislation in Italy.
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Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez
1797 - 1869 (72 years)
Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez was a Swiss liberal thinker. My mission is to influence the world, he wrote in 1844. While his economic though stimulated some responses, that is hardly the case for his political ideas, in effect stillborn. Unlike his compatriots Benjamin Constant and Jean de Sismondi, Cherbuliez has had little attention from contemporary historians. His thoughts were spread thinly over various publications, with no major work of synthesis. He was a retiring academic and somewhat isolated.
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Thomas Roderick Dew
1802 - 1846 (44 years)
Thomas Roderick Dew was a professor and public intellectual, then president of The College of William & Mary . Although he first achieved national stature for opposing protective tariffs, today Dew may be best known for his pro-slavery advocacy.
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Mieczysław Witold Gutkowski
1893 - 1943 (50 years)
Mieczysław Witold Gutkowski was a Polish lawyer, a world-renowned economist who specialized in public finance, and one of the first scholars of economic analysis of law in Poland. He was a professor at the Stefan Batory University in Wilno. He was murdered by German SS units and Lithuanian collaborators in the Ponary massacre.
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Robert Wallace
1697 - 1771 (74 years)
Robert Wallace was a minister of the Church of Scotland and writer on population. Life He was the only son of Margaret Stewart, wife of Rev Matthew Wallace, the parish minister of Kincardine-in-Menteith , where he was born on 7 January 1697. Educated at Stirling grammar school, he then attended the University of Edinburgh in 1711, and acted for a time as assistant to James Gregory, the University professor of mathematics. He was one of the founders of the Rankenian Club in 1717.
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Joseph Lowe
Joseph Lowe was a Scottish journalist and political economist, well known for his pioneer treatment of indexation. Maurice Kendall called him the generally recognised "father of index numbers". In the debate on the Corn Laws in 1839, Sir Robert Peel cited the views of Lowe and Thomas Tooke, to argue against imposing a low fixed rate of import duty on corn.
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Gian Domenico Romagnosi
1761 - 1835 (74 years)
Gian Domenico Romagnosi was an Italian philosopher, economist and jurist. Biography Gian Domenico Romagnosi was born in Salsomaggiore Terme. He studied law at the University of Parma from 1782 to 1786. In 1791 he became the chief civil magistrate of Trento. In the late 18th and early 19th century Trento was successively under the rule of France, Italy and Austria. In 1799 Romagnosi was arrested in Innsbruck during fifteen months by the Austrians on account of his alleged sympathy with the French, but he was acquitted. In 1801 the French occupied Trento, and he was raised to the position of Secretary of the Higher Council.
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Dimitar Dobrev
1888 - 1961 (73 years)
Dimitar Dobrev was one of Bulgaria’s leading economists and academicians. He worked in the field of accountancy as science, a theoretician, economist, lecturer, second Rector of the Free University of Political and Economic Sciences, professor at the State High School of Finance and administrative sciences and the Higher Economics Institute "Karl Marx".
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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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Melchiorre Gioia
1767 - 1829 (62 years)
Melchiorre Gioja was an Italian writer on philosophy and political economy. His name is spelled Gioia in modern Italian. Biography Gioja was born at Piacenza, in what is now northern Italy. Originally intended for the church, he took orders, but renounced them in 1796 and went to Milan, where he devoted himself to the study of political economy. Having obtained the prize for an essay on "the kind of free government best adapted to Italy" he decided upon the career of a publicist.
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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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Harmon White Caldwell
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Harmon White Caldwell was President of the University of Georgia in Athens from 1935 until 1948 and Chancellor of the University System of Georgia from 1948 to 1964. Caldwell was born in the Carmel Community of Meriwether County, Georgia, in 1899. He earned an A.B. from UGA in 1919 after only two years and was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity and the Phi Kappa Literary Society. Upon graduation, he taught public school in both Sasser, Georgia and Taylorsville, Georgia. In 1921, Caldwell entered the Harvard Law School and graduated with the degree Bachelor of Law in 1924. That same year he ...
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William Rollo
1894 - 1960 (66 years)
William Rollo Jr. was a Scottish-born South African academic. History Rollo was born in 1892 in Glasgow and graduated from the University of Glasgow with an MA in classics in 1915. After the war he completed his DLitt in linguistics at Leiden University. His thesis was on the Marquina dialect of the Basque language. He immigrated to South Africa in 1925, where he was professor of classics, then Head of the Classics Department and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Cape Town until 1953, when he was invited to take up the post of interim principal of the University College of Rhod...
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Siegfried Becher
1806 - 1873 (67 years)
Siegfried Becher was an Austrian political economist, Biography Becher was born in Planá . He studied at Prague and Vienna. In 1831, he entered government service. He was appointed professor at the Polytechnic Institute, Vienna, in 1835. From 1848 to 1852, he was employed in the ministry of commerce, for which he made a trip of investigation in Germany and Belgium in 1849. He died in Vienna.
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John Stuart Mackenzie
1860 - 1935 (75 years)
John Stuart Mackenzie was a British philosopher, born near Glasgow, and educated at Glasgow, Cambridge, and Berlin. In 1884-89 he was a fellow at Edinburgh and from 1890 to 1896 fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He lectured on political economy at Owens College, Manchester, in 1890-93, and in 1895 became professor of logic and philosophy in University College, Cardiff. Mackenzie was an idealist philosopher and a Hegelian of the type of Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, and Caird.
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Ivan Ozerov
1869 - 1942 (73 years)
Ivan Christoforovich Ozerov – Russian professor, financier, economist, urban planning specialist, prose writer. Biography Born in 1869 in a peasant family. He studied at a two-year folk school and showed such abilities there that teachers strongly advised and helped his mother arrange Ivan at the Chukhloma city school, and then he studied at the Kostroma gymnasium for a Susanin scholarship . After graduating from high school with a gold medal, he entered the law faculty of Moscow University. Under the leadership of professor I. I. Yanzhula engaged in economic sciences. After graduating from M...
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Tullio Martello
1841 - 1918 (77 years)
Tullio Martello was an Italian economist. He took part in the Expedition of the Thousand. Works Bibliography
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Lysander Spooner
1808 - 1887 (79 years)
Lysander Spooner was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphletist, political philosopher, Unitarian and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition. Although the notion of Spooner as an anarchist has been challenged by legal historian Clay S. Conrad, who pointed out that Spooner advocated constitutionally limited governments in his writings .
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Karl Julius Beloch
1854 - 1929 (75 years)
Karl Julius Beloch was a German classical and economic historian. Biography From 1872 to 1875, he studied classical philology and ancient history in Freiburg, Heidelberg and Rome, obtaining his PhD from the University of Rome in 1875 . In 1879 he became an associate professor at Rome, where, from 1891 to 1912, he served as a full professor of ancient history. In 1912/13, he was a professor of ancient history at the University of Leipzig.
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Giorgio Valla
1447 - 1499 (52 years)
Giorgio Valla was an Italian academic, mathematician, philologist and translator. Life He was born in Piacenza in 1447. He was the son of Andrea Valla and Cornelia Corvini. At the age of fifteen Giorgio Valla moved to Milan, where he was educated by the famous Neoplatonic Hellenist Constantine Lascaris. Among his works is a Latin translation of the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo and Aristarchus's On the Sizes and Distances . The De expetendis et fugiendis rebus is the most valuable work produced by Valla.
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Robert Lacour-Gayet
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Robert Lacour-Gayet was a French banking official, historian, author, and educator who taught in the United States after World War II. Life and career Lacour-Gayet came from a family of intellectuals, teachers, and historians. His maternal grandfather was Paul Janet, a French philosopher. His father, Georges Lacour-Gayet, was a historian who published a famous biography of Talleyrand. His brother, , was an economic historian with whom he frequently collaborated. His half-sister, Georgette Elgey, also became a historian.
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Max Sering
1857 - 1939 (82 years)
Max Sering was a German economist. Sering was considered the most famous German agricultural economist of his time; his students briefly included Otto von Habsburg. Sering studied in both Strasbourg and Leipzig, before entering the civil service in Alsace in 1879. In 1883 he was sent by the Prussian government to North America to study agricultural competition.
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Paul Magnus Gross
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
Paul Magnus Gross, Sr. was an American chemist and educator at Duke University. Early life Gross was born on September 15, 1895. Education Gross received a B.S. degree from City College of New York in 1916, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in 1917 and 1919.
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Thomas Cooper
1759 - 1839 (80 years)
Thomas Cooper was an Anglo-American economist, college president and political philosopher. Cooper was described by Thomas Jefferson as "one of the ablest men in America" and by John Adams as "a learned ingenious scientific and talented madcap." Dumas Malone stated that "modern scientific progress would have been impossible without the freedom of the mind which he championed throughout life." His ideas were taken very seriously in his own time: there were substantial reviews of his writings, and some late eighteenth-century critics of materialism directed their arguments against Cooper, rath...
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Sydney James Butlin
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Sydney James Christopher Lyon Butlin was an Australian economist and historian. He was born on 20 October 1910 in Eastwood, a suburb of Sydney, the second of six children of Australian-born parents, Thomas Lyon Butlin, an orchard farmer and railway porter and Sara Mary, née Chantler. He is the brother of notable economic historian, Noel George Butlin .
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Itrat Husain Zuberi
1910 - 1964 (54 years)
Itrat Husain Zuberi was a noted educationist of Pakistan. He started his educational career as a teacher in East Pakistan. He served in various capacities such as professor, Principal, Vice Chancellor, Education Advisor and Member, Executive Board of UNESCO till his retirement. Itrat was the first Indian to have the distinction of being elected a Carnegie Fellow at Oxford.
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James Johnston Shaw
1845 - 1910 (65 years)
James Johnston Shaw was an Irish county court judge. Early life He was born at Kircubbin, County Down, Ireland on 4 January 1845, the second son among seven children of John Maxwell Shaw , a merchant and farmer at Kircubbin, by his wife Anne, daughter of Adam Johnston. Shaw was first taught in a local national school, and later by James Rowan, Presbyterian minister of Kircubbin. In 1858 he was sent to the Belfast Academy, where he became a favourite pupil of the principal, Rev. Reuben John Bryce, LL.D. . In 1861 he entered Queen's College, Belfast, gaining the highest entrance scholarship in classics, the first of many honours.
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Charles L. Beach
1866 - 1933 (67 years)
Charles Lewis Beach was an American agricultural educator who served as the 4th president of Connecticut Agricultural College, now the University of Connecticut, from 1908 to 1928. Beach played a pivotal role in UConn's development. He also laid the foundations for the future William Benton Museum of Art. Beach is one of only five presidents to hold the honorary title of President Emeritus.
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James Wilson
1805 - 1860 (55 years)
James Wilson was a Scottish businessman, economist, and Liberal politician who founded The Economist weekly and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, which merged with Standard Bank in 1969 to form Standard Chartered. He was the first Finance Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council from December 1859 until his death in August 1860. Sent there to put order into the chaos that followed the "Sepoy Mutiny" of 1857, he presented India's first budget, and was responsible for the government accounting system, Pay Office, and audit, apart from government paper currency, Indian Police, a...
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Thomas Swain Barclay
1892 - 1993 (101 years)
Thomas Swain Barclay was a professor of political science at Stanford University. He taught five U.S. senators and countless other Stanford University students over three decades. Barclay was born into a politically active Democratic family in St. Louis, Missouri.
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Alex Hunter
1919 - 1971 (52 years)
Alexander Hunter was a Scottish-Australian industrial economist. He arrived in Australia in 1958 after being appointed a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne. He then gained prominence as the editor of The Economics of Australian Industry. He became a professor of economics at the University of New South Wales in 1961, then moving to the Australian National University in 1965. He was a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies. He was married to Thelma Anna Carmela Cibelli and had three children. Hunter died of a coronary occlusion during a visit t...
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Ernest Boyd MacNaughton
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Ernest Boyd MacNaughton was president of the First National Bank of Oregon , then chairman , president of The Oregonian publishing company , and president of Reed College . He is the namesake of the ACLU E.B. MacNaughton Civil Liberties Award.
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William Cunningham Smith
1871 - 1943 (72 years)
William Cunningham Smith was an American academic of English literature, university administrator, and writer. Life and career Born in Greensboro, Smith was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He attended graduate school at Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1900 he came to the State Normal and Industrial College as a professor of English, and in 1904 he became head of the department. In 1905, Smith became Dean of the College, in 1915 Dean of the Faculty, and in 1922 Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. During his tenure at the College he was chairman of chapel and conducted devotional services.
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Carl Heinrich Hagen
1785 - 1856 (71 years)
Carl Heinrich Hagen was a jurist, socio-economist and, between 1811 and 1835, senior government official . From 1811 he was also a professor of jurisprudence and the University of Königsberg in what was at that time East Prussia.
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Hugo Richard Meyer
1866 - 1923 (57 years)
Hugo Richard Meyer was an American author and economist concerned with public ownership of telegraph, phone, railway and other utilities. Biography Meyer graduated from Harvard College in 1892, and attended the Harvard Graduate School in 1892-96 where he received an A.M. in 1894. He was instructor in political economy at Harvard in 1897-1903, and was assistant professor in that subject at the University of Chicago in 1904-05. After 1907, he resided in Melbourne where he was writing a history of state ownership in Victoria, Australia.
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George Grafton Wilson
1863 - 1951 (88 years)
George Grafton Wilson was a distinguished professor of International Law during the first half of the 20th century. He served on the faculties of Brown University, Harvard University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the U.S. Naval War College.
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Werner von Siemens
1816 - 1892 (76 years)
Ernst Werner Siemens was a German electrical engineer, inventor and industrialist. Siemens's name has been adopted as the SI unit of electrical conductance, the siemens. He founded the electrical and telecommunications conglomerate Siemens and invented the electric tram, trolley bus, electric locomotive and electric elevator.
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