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 people in Economics,

#4001

Nancy Gallini

#141160
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Nancy T. Gallini is an economist, professor emeritus, researcher, and author. She is a professor emeritus at the Vancouver School of Economics based in the University of British Columbia. She has served on multiple editorial boards such as American Economic Review, International Journal of Industrial Organization, Journal of Economic Literature and the Journal of Industrial Economics. In 2008, Dr. Gallini was appointed as a member to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. From 2011-2014 Dr. Gallini served on the executive council for the Canadian Economic Association. H...
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#4002

Luke Georghiou

#72046
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Luke Georghiou is Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Manchester. He is also professor of science and technology policy and management at the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research at Manchester Business School.
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#4003

Diana Green

#131136
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Diana Margaret Green is a British economist and academic, and a former vice-chancellor. Early life She attended South Park High School for Girls in Lincoln, also known as South Park Girls' High School; Lincoln went comprehensive in 1974. She has said of her time at her grammar school Going to a grammar school was critical in terms of my career. I was encouraged to be ambitious.
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#4004

Sidney L. Jones

#85383
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Sidney Lewis Jones is an American economist and former official in the United States federal government. Educated at Utah State University and Stanford University, he initially taught in universities until he was recruited to join the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers. From there he held a number of positions in and out of government, including senior roles in the Departments of Commerce and the Treasury. A Republican, he has held strong views during his career about controlling inflation and federal government spending but was nonetheless well regarded as an economist across the poli...
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#4005

Stuart Turnbull

#171046
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Stuart M. Turnbull is professor emeritus, the Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. Stuart has authored over sixty academic papers in the areas of financial economics, law and economics, and the general area of derivatives. He is currently an associate editor Journal of Credit Risk and the International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance. He was the editor of the Journal of Credit Risk and an associate editor of the Journal of Derivatives, Journal of Finance and Mathematical Finance.
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#4006

Peter George

Peter George
#99926
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Peter James George, was a Canadian economist and university administrator. On June 30, 2010, he retired after serving three five year terms as President and Vice-Chancellor of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
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#4007

Martin Schneider

#179771
Overall Influence
Martin Schneider is a German economist who is currently professor of economics at Stanford University. His research focuses on macroeconomics and financial economics. Education Schneider received his Diplom in economics from the University of Bonn in 1993. He went on to further study with at Stanford University and graduated with a Ph.D. in economics in 1999. He was awarded a Stanford University and Bradley Foundation Fellowship during his time at Stanford.
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#4008

Budy P Resosudarmo

#175725
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Budy P. Resosudarmo is a professor in development and environmental economics at the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Crawford School of Public Policy, at the Australian National University . He is the head of the ANU Indonesia Project and the deputy director of the Poverty and Inequality Research Centre. He was the education director of the Crawford School for the 2021-2022 period. Since 2022, he has been a Fellow of the Regional Science Association International.
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#4009

Stéphane Bonhomme

#175683
Overall Influence
Stéphane Bonhomme is a French economist currently at the University of Chicago, where he is the Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor of Economics. Bonhomme specializes in microeconometrics. His research involves latent variable modeling, modeling of unobserved heterogeneity in panel data, and its applications in labor economics, in particular the analysis of earnings inequality and dynamics.
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#4010

Steven Venti

#177468
Overall Influence
Steven F. Venti is the DeWalt Ankeny Professor of Economic Policy and a professor of economics at Dartmouth College. Background and research Venti's research focuses on "the well-being of older households" and he currently is examining the "effectiveness of 401s and similar retirement saving plans, whether the elderly are financially prepared for retirement, how households manage their wealth after retirement, and the role of health in the financial security of older households." His research has been cited over 6,000 times and has been published in a number of top economic journals such as the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
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#4011

Paul Gregg

#153257
Overall Influence
Professor Paul Gregg is a British academic, and expert on labour markets and welfare reform. He is currently a Commissioner on the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. Academic career Paul Gregg is Professor of Economic and Social Policy at the University of Bath and Senior Research Fellow in Labour Markets at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.
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#4012

Omari Swinton

#149051
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Omari Holmes Swinton is an American economist who is chair of the Economics department at Howard University and a former president of the National Economic Association. Biography Swinton is the son of economist David Swinton. He completed his B.S. in Economics at Florida A&M in 2001, and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Duke University in 2003 and 2007 respectively.
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#4013

Carlos Minc

#81239
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Carlos Minc Baumfeld is a Brazilian geographer, professor, environmentalist, politician and Minister of Environment in Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's second term as president of Brazil. Personal life Minc was born on July 12, 1951. He studied at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. He was a student leader and participated in resistance against the military dictatorship. He was arrested in 1969 and exiled. In 1979, with the help from Amnesty, he returned to Brazil.
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#4014

Fernando Gomez-Bezares

#139547
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Fernando Gómez-Bezares is an economist, professor in several universities, and author of numerous publications in his field. In the 1980s he developed a method of selection of risky investments called Penalized present value .
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#4015

Linda Weiser Friedman

#58784
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Linda Weiser Friedman is an author and academic. She is a Professor of Statistics and Computer Information Systems at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Friedman holds a PhD in Operations Research from New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering and a B.A degree in Statistics / Biology from Baruch College. Her research and teaching interests are varied and include business statistics, object-oriented programming, humor studies, Jewish studies, online education, social media, and all things technology. Her most recent book is God Laughed: Sources of Jewish Humor , which Publishers Weekly called a "lighthearted but thoughtful study".
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#4016

Kirsten Sehnbruch

Kirsten Sehnbruch
#139534
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Kirsten Sehnbruch is a British Academy Global Professor and Distinguished Policy Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Sehnbruch is known for her work on conceptualising and measuring the quality of employment, particularly in developing countries. Her research subjects include quality of employment, multidimensional indicators, Latin American labour markets, labour relations, Chilean politics and public policy.
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#4017

Kjell G. Nyborg

#150644
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Kjell G. Nyborg is a financial economist. Since 2009, he has been a Chaired Professor of Finance at the University of Zurich, Department of Banking and Finance, where he is currently also Vice Director. In addition, he is a Senior Chair of the Swiss Finance Institute , a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research , and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Nyborg is the President of the European Finance Association for 2017 as well as a former Director and Vice President. He has worked on a broad range of topics. The focus in his more recent work is on the role of money, liquidity, and collateral in Financial markets.
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#4018

Włodzimierz Sroka

#103051
Overall Influence
1967 - 2023 (56 years)
Włodzimierz Krzysztof Sroka was a Polish economist and manager, associate professor of strategic management at the WSB University in Dąbrowa Górnicza. Life and career A graduate of the University of Economics in Katowice, he earned his PhD in economics in 1999 at the Faculty of Management of the same university, based on the thesis entitled Strategic alliances as a form of cooperation in a global environment. In 2012 he received his habilitation degree in the same discipline at the University of Žilina on the basis of the thesis entitled Management as the key success factor of alliance networ...
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#4019

Georges de Ménil

Georges de Ménil
#165561
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Georges de Ménil is a macroeconomics policy advisor, European political commentator, and professor emeritus of economics in France and the United States. He was Enseignant-Chercheur at l'EHESS. Early years Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard University , and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he was one of the four co-authors of a 1966 historical study edited by sociologist Laurence Wiley, Chanzeaux, a village in Anjou. de Ménil’s PhD thesis focused on how wage rates are determined, and was published by MIT Press as "Bargaining: Monopoly Power vs. Union Power." It employed an economic model cited by Solow in a later work.
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#4020

Heizō Takenaka

#122354
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Heizō Takenaka is a Japanese economist, retired politician, and political activist last serving as Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications and Minister of State for Privatization of the Postal Services in the cabinet of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. As of July 2007, he is a professor at Keio University and an advisor for other academic institutions and companies.
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#4021

Martin Bossert

#66917
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Martin Bossert from Ulm University, Ulm, Germany was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 for contributions to reliable data transmission including code constructions and soft decision decoding.
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#4022

Lawrence Eliot Klein

#176160
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Lawrence Eliot Klein is an historian and fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. Klein is a specialist in the cultural history of eighteenth-century Britain and particularly ideas and practices associated with the concept of politeness.
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#4023

Elspeth Rostow

#68571
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Elspeth Rostow was Dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin from 1977 to 1983. Education Elspeth Vaughan Davies was born October 20, 1917. She graduated from Barnard College in 1938. She received a master's degree in history from Radcliffe College in 1939 and a master's degree from University of Cambridge in 1949.
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#4024

David Lee

#181115
Overall Influence
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#4025

Noah Williams

#63219
Overall Influence
Noah Williams is an American economist and professor of economics at the Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami. He previously was a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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#4026

Philip Auerswald

#97163
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Philip E. Auerswald is an American author, economist, and cofounder and coeditor of Innovations . His most recent book, The Code Economy: A Forty-Thousand-Year History, explains how code has been a key driver of human development.
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#4027

Larry E. Greiner

#38252
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Larry E. Greiner is an American economist, former Professor of Management and Organizations at University of Southern California USC Marshall School of Business. Academic background Greiner bachelor's degree from the University of Kansas at a young age first. In 1958, Greiner entered Harvard Business School, and where he received an MBA within 2 years, DBA from Harvard Business School in 1966 again.
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#4028

Aryness Joy Wickens

#139543
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Aryness Joy Wickens was an American economist and statistician who served as acting commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and as president of the American Statistical Association, and who helped develop the United States Consumer Price Index.
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#4029

Charles L. Betsey

#168827
Overall Influence
Charles L. Betsey is an American economist who is professor emeritus of Economics and Former Interim Dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. He is a former president of the National Economic Association.
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#4030

Sean Holly

#118607
Overall Influence
Sean Holly is an economist currently working at the University of Cambridge . He previously held a Professorship at the University of Sheffield. He is the Dean of Fitzwilliam College He has written the book 'Optimal Control, Expectations and Uncertainty'.
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#4031

Lane P. Hughston

#26997
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Lane P. Hughston is an American mathematician. Early life and education Lane P. Hughston was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and raised in Dallas, Texas, where he attended J. J. Pershing Elementary School, Benjamin Franklin Junior High School, and Hillcrest High School. He is the son of Edward Wallace Hughston and Joan Palmer Hughston. He holds a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and a student of Roger Penrose. While he was a student at Oxford he was based at Magdalen College.
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#4032

Gerald Shively

#177980
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Gerald Shively is an American economist and Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University. He teaches and publishes research articles and books related to contemporary policy-related issues in economic development. His specializations are in poverty, food security and sustainable development.
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#4033

Lionel Zinsou

#93441
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Lionel Zinsou is a French–Beninese economist and investment banker who was Prime Minister of Benin from 2015 to 2016. Since June 2017, he has been the president of Terra Nova, a centre-left French think tank.
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#4034

Keith Coble

#181400
Overall Influence
Keith Coble is an American agricultural economist focusing on risk management, food and agricultural policy, renewable energy, insurance, climate, and experimental economics. He is currently a W. L. Giles Distinguished Professor at Mississippi State University.
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#4035

Stanisław Flejterski

Stanisław Flejterski
#140960
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Stanisław Flejterski is a Polish economist, professor of economic sciences. He is employed as full professor at Szczecin University. Biography In 1966 he graduated from the Stefan Żeromski General Secondary School at Darłowo. In 1970 he graduated with distinction from the Transport and Economic Department of the Szczecin Polytechnic. W 1974 he defended a doctorate dissertation at the same department. In 1998 he received his postdoctoral degree . For his postdoctoral dissertation in 1999 he received the award of the Commercial Bank in Warsaw SA . He has been titular professor since 2007. His...
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#4036

Joseph R. Mason

#170586
Overall Influence
Joseph R. Mason is an American economist and Russell B. Long Professor in Finance at E. J. Ourso College of Business. His research specializes on financial intermediation and economic growth, with more interest on financial innovation and the role it plays in economic expansions as well as financial crises.
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#4037

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi

Lorenzo Bini Smaghi
#166221
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Lorenzo Bini Smaghi is an Italian economist and banker who served as a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank from 2005 to 2011. He has been Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Société Générale since 2015.
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#4038

Harriet Orcutt Duleep

#123578
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Harriet Orcutt Duleep is a Research Professor with The Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy of the College of William and Mary. She was a daughter of economist Guy Orcutt and is sister to economist Alice Nakamura.
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#4039

Alan David Freeman

#181510
Overall Influence
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#4040

Kasey Buckles

#169596
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Kasey Buckles is a professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor , and co-editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management She is known for her studies of the declining fertility of American women in recent years.
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#4041

Wei Xinghua

#165042
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Wei Xinghua was a Chinese economist and educator. He specialized in the study of capital and contributed to the "sinicization" of Marxist political economy. He served as professor and chair of the Department of Economics of Renmin University of China and was awarded the national honorary title of "People's Educator" in 2019.
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#4042

William Frederic Boulding

#168027
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
William Frederic Boulding is an American economist, professor and academic administrator. He is the dean of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Biography Early life Boulding was born 1955 in Ann Arbor as the fifth Child son of Kenneth E. Boulding, an English-born economist, and Elise M. Boulding, a Norwegian-born sociologist.
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#4043

Martin C. Schmalz

#138197
Overall Influence
1984 - Present (42 years)
Martin Schmalz is a German financial economist. He is the Head of the Finance, Accounting, Management, and Economics Area and Professor of Finance and Economics at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School. He is also the Chief Economist and Director of the Office of Economic and Risk Analysis of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.
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#4044

Max Schanzenbach

#153245
Overall Influence
Max M. Schanzenbach is the Seigle Family Professor of Law at the Northwestern University School of Law. Education Schanzenbach received his JD from Yale Law School and his PhD in economics from Yale University.
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#4045

Phil Leeson

#138225
Overall Influence
1925 - 2004 (79 years)
Philip Frank Leeson was a development economist and communist activist. Life He was born in Barnton, Cheshire, was educated at Sir John Deane's grammar school, Northwich, and between 1943 and 1947 served in the British Army . After his military service he read modern history, economics and politics at the Victoria University of Manchester where he was to spend most of the rest of his working life as an academic lecturing and researching in the university's economics department. He also lectured for the Workers' Educational Association, World Development and UN Association meetings, and to six...
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#4046

John H. Patterson

#140611
Overall Influence
1905 - Present (121 years)
John H. Patterson of Greensburg, Pennsylvania was an American economist, academic and writer known for his progressive trade position during the debate over the Smoot-Hawley Act. With Paul O'Leary, he authored An Introduction to Money, Banking and Corporations in 1937.
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#4047

Marc Blanchard

#69993
Overall Influence
1942 - 2009 (67 years)
Marc Blanchard was a professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis. He was born in 1942 to a French father and French Jewish mother who were fleeing Nazi persecution and was brought up in Argentina and Egypt. The family returned to Paris after the war, where he earned a degree at the Sorbonne in 1965, in Agrégation de lettres classiques .
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#4048

Volker Oppitz

#116448
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
Volker Oppitz is a German economist and mathematician. Life Oppitz graduated in 1950 from the Deutsche Müllerschule Dippoldiswalde , in 1952 from the School of Engineering Dippoldiswalde in mechanical and electrical engineering and in 1956 in economics at the Dresden University of Technology. In 1970 he earned his Ph.D. in the field of economics of industrial sectors at the Dresden University of Technology. In 1971 he became Assistant Professor at the Dresden University of Technology in Faculty of Economics. After making his habilitation treatise in 1981 at the University of Rostock he became in 1987 Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economics of the Dresden University of Technology.
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#4049

Talat Mahmood

#181842
Overall Influence
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#4050

Samuel L. Myers Sr.

#76499
Overall Influence
1919 - 2021 (102 years)
Samuel Lloyd Myers Sr. was an American economist, university president, education adviser and civil rights advocate. One of Myers' most significant contributions to society occurred during his 18-year tenure as the president of the National Association for Equal Opportunity where he fought to sustain the establishment of historically black colleges by providing them access to a billion dollars of federal aid.
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