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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Economics,
#4151
Joseph Wu
#75988
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Joseph Wu Jaushieh is a Taiwanese politician currently serving as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Taiwan under current President Tsai Ing-wen since February 26, 2018. He was formerly the Secretary-General to the President of Taiwan and the Secretary-General of the National Security Council of Taiwan. From 2007 to 2008, he was Chief Representative of Taiwan to the United States as the head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington, D.C., having been appointed to that position by President Chen Shui-bian to succeed his predecessor, David Lee. On February 26...
Go to Profile#4152
Greg Hunt
#76388
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Gregory Andrew Hunt is an Australian former politician who was the Minister for Health between January 2017 and May 2022. He was a Liberal Party member of the House of Representatives between November 2001 and 2022, representing the Division of Flinders in Victoria. He has previously served as a parliamentary secretary in the Howard government , Minister for the Environment , Minister for Industry, Innovation and Science , and Minister for Sport .
Go to Profile#4153
Gediminas Černiauskas
#180703
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Gediminas Černiauskas is a Lithuanian economist and politician, and, for a brief time in 2008, the Lithuanian Health Minister in the government of Gediminas Kirkilas. In 1980, he graduated from Vilnius University with a specialization in the field of industrial planning. From 1983 to 1986, he studied for a doctorate at the Institute of Economics of the University of Vilnius.
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Krzysztof Zamasz
#174047
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Krzysztof Zamasz – Polish manager and economist, associate professor at the Silesian University of Technology and the WSB University in Dąbrowa Górnicza, member of the board of Tauron Polska Energia S.A. from 2008 to 2012, President of the Management Board of ENEA S.A. in 2013–2015, from 2017 to June 2018, a member of the board of the Górnośląsko-Zagłębiowa Metropolis. A board member of the European Investment Fund Luma Holding since July 2018, CEO of LuNa Smelter from July 2018 to August 2019, implemented a Polish investment project in Rwanda and DR of Congo. Since August 2019, he has been the Development Advisor to the President of the Veolia Group Management Board.
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David Deming
#158417
Overall Influence
David J. Deming is an American economist and Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, His research focuses on the economics of education in general and the impact of education policies on long-run non-test score outcomes. In 2018, David Deming received the David N. Kershaw Award and Prize from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management for his work in the areas of secondary education, vocational training and skills.
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Colette Henry
#117961
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Colette Henry is an Irish social scientist who is Head of the Department of Business Studies at Dundalk Institute of Technology. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the founding editor of The International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship.
Go to Profile#4157
William Woodruff
#45491
Overall Influence
1916 - 2008 (92 years)
William Woodruff was a professor of world history and author. His two autobiographical works, The Road to Nab End and its sequel Beyond Nab End, both became bestsellers in the United Kingdom. The memoirs, covering Woodruff's impoverished upbringing in an English weaving community during the Great Depression, contain significant amounts of social commentary about the conditions in which he lived.
Go to Profile#4158
Michael Dowling
#100619
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michael Dowling is an American scholar, and Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at the University of Regensburg, in Germany. Background Prof. Dr. Michael Dowling was named to the Professorship for Innovation and Technology Management at the University of Regensburg effective July 1, 1996. Previously he had been an Assistant Professor and Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Georgia, USA. Prof. Dowling was born in 1958 in New York, USA. He is the younger brother of physicist Jonathan Dowling. He graduated from Clear Lake High School in Houston, Texas as Salutatorian of the Class of 1976.
Go to Profile#4159
E. Philip Howrey
#139727
Overall Influence
1937 - 2011 (74 years)
Eugene Philip Howrey was an American economist. He taught at the University of Michigan until 2005. Born in Geneva, Illinois, Howrey was raised in Iowa, where he attended Fairfield High School and later Drake University. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Go to Profile#4160
Sayed Moazzem Hossain
#66643
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Syed Moazzem Hossain was a Bangladeshi academic and Islamic scholar. He served as the vice-chancellor of the University of Dhaka. Early life and education Hossain was born on 1 August 1901, to a Bengali Muslim family of Syeds in the village of Baniara in Mirzapur, Tangail District. He earned his Master's in Arabic from the University of Dhaka in 1924. He then joined the same university as a research scholar in Bangla. In 1926, he went to Oxford University to obtain D Phil and D Litt degrees, writing his thesis on classical Arabic poetry. He then earned his LLD degree from Dalhousie University...
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Jörg Meuthen
#79374
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jörg Hubert Meuthen is a German economist serving as an independent member of the European Parliament. He was frontrunner for the AfD at the 2016 Baden-Württemberg state election and was a Member of Parliament and parliamentary leader from March 2016. He was the leading candidate of the Alternative for Germany for the 2019 European Parliament election. He served as federal spokesman for, and thus leader of, the AfD from July 2015 until his resignation in January 2022, caused by conflict with right-wing extremist elements in the party. In June 2022 he joined the German Centre Party.
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Pedro Marín Uribe
#178889
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Pedro L. Marín Uribe is a Spanish economist and professor at the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid. Since April 2008 he assumed the role of Secretary of State for Energy of Spain. Education Degree in Economics and Business, University of Valencia, 1988 and Master in Economics at the London School of Economics, 1991 in where he also received a PhD in Economics in 1995.
Go to Profile#4163
Firouz Gahvari
#185475
Overall Influence
Firouz Gahvari is an American economist, focusing in public economics and optimal taxation, currently the Leiby Hall Distinguished Professor of Economics at University of Illinois. Bibliography
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Joseph F.X. Zahra
#143853
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Joseph F.X. Zahra is a Maltese economist. He has held a number of directorships in both private and public companies in Malta and abroad. He is a former director of the Central Bank of Malta and former chairman of Bank of Valletta plc, Maltacom plc and Middlesea Insurance plc. He is married with two children.
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Ron Dembo
#170295
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Ron Samuel Dembo is an academic and entrepreneur. Academia From 1976 to 1986, Dembo served as a professor at Yale University. During this time, he held joint appointments in both the Department of Computer Science and the School of Management. Additionally, he served as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . Dembo's scholarly contributions encompass a diverse range of subjects, including finance and mathematical optimization. Notably, he has also garnered several patents in fields such as computational finance, climate change, and software engineering.
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Michael Watts
#185509
Overall Influence
#4167
Nobutaka Ike
#93038
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Nobutaka Ike was a Stanford University professor of Japanese and East Asian politics. He wrote many books on the Japanese political system. Early life and education Nobutaka Ike was born in Seattle as a US citizen to parents who immigrated from Japan. He studied political science at University of Washington and got his BA in 1940. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was forcibly relocated to Camp Harmony, but was released in summer 1942 due to his willingness to assist the US Navy with translation work. After the war, he resumed his studies and got his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins U...
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Leslie Young
#175973
Overall Influence
1949 - 2022 (73 years)
Leslie Young was a New Zealand–Chinese economist. His interests included uncertainty in international trade, and the influence of culture and political economy on economic performance. He was the executive director of the Asia Pacific Institute of Business from 1993, and was a long-serving member of the American Economic Review editorial board.
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Brian Knight
#185565
Overall Influence
1999 - Present (27 years)
Brian G. Knight is an economics professor at Brown University, as well as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his B.S. from Miami University in 1992, and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2000, under the supervision of Arik Levinson.
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David B. Yoffie
#49733
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
David B. Yoffie is the Max and Doris Starr Professor of International Business Administration at Harvard Business School . Education and career Yoffie received his bachelor's degree pa from Brandeis University and his Master's and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford, where he taught for two years, and spent more than three years as a visiting scholar between 1995 and 2020. Over the last two decades, he has chaired the Harvard Business School's Strategy department, Harvard's Advanced Management Program, Harvard's Young Presidents' Organization program, Harvard's World President's Organization, Harvard's YPO Gold program, as well as several other executive programs.
Go to Profile#4171
Robert D. Manning
#33063
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Robert D. Manning is a former financial advisor in consumer credit and financial services. Up until 2008, Manning was a professor of finance at Rochester Institute of Technology's E. Philip Saunders College of Business.
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Timothy M. Devinney
#114526
Overall Influence
Timothy M. Devinney is an Australian-American-British management scholar. He holds the position of Chair and Professor of International Business and Strategy at Alliance Manchester Business School. Born in the Lawrenceville district of Pittsburgh PA, he attended Central Catholic High School and subsequently graduated from Carnegie Mellon University . He attended the University of Chicago and received three degrees – MA , MBA , PhD in Economics. His dissertation was entitled "A General Equilibrium Analysis of the Borrower-Lender Relationship: An Examination of the Credit Rationing Hypothesis".
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Charlotte F. Muller
#181993
Overall Influence
1921 - Present (105 years)
Charlotte Feldman Muller is Professor Emerita of economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and associate director for economics at the International Leadership Center on Longevity and Society, Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She is an author of the book Health Care and Gender and numerous scientific articles. Among her research interests are women's health, health care and aging.
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Cécile Ané
#180309
Overall Influence
Cécile Ané is an evolutionary biologist, botanist, and statistical geneticist whose research involves the inference of evolutionary trees and the evolution of inherited traits, especially for plant species, as well as the mathematical statistics underlying these methods. Educated in France, she works in the US as a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with joint appointments in the departments of botany and statistics.
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Sanjay Srivastava
#185725
Overall Influence
#4176
Dilip Ratha
#166046
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Dilip Ratha is a scholar of international migration and its relationship with global development. He is known for his role in adding remittances to discussions of migration and development, starting around 2003.
Go to Profile#4177
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes
#102573
Overall Influence
Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes is a Spanish economist, a Professor in the Economics and Business Management faculty at the University of California, Merced and a Professor and Department Chair at San Diego State University. Since 2015, she has been the Western Representative for a standing committee called the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession . Her field of work focuses on the fundamentals of labour economics and international migration, particularly the nature of immigration policies and its impact on migrant's assimilation into the community at a state and local level....
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José Encarnación Jr.
#179186
Overall Influence
1928 - 1998 (70 years)
José Encarnación Jr. was a Filipino professor of economics at the University of the Philippines Diliman, where he served as dean of the School of Economics from 1974 until his retirement in 1994. Education Encarnación was educated at UP Diliman and at Princeton University . He was a member of the Upsilon Sigma Phi fraternity. At Princeton he was a student and dissertation advisee of William J. Baumol. The only Filipino economist of his generation to work in the field of theory, Encarnación was best known for advancing the theory of lexicographic preferences, which in the words of Richard Day, Encarnación "almost singlehandedly kept alive".
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Bonnie K. Campbell
#178655
Overall Influence
Bonnie Kathleen Campbell , is professor emeritus of political economy at the Department of Political Science at the Université du Québec à Montréal . She has written extensively on issues related to international development, development assistance, governance, and mining.
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Stephanie Shipp
#81978
Overall Influence
Stephanie Slepicka Shipp is an American economist and social statistician. She works at the University of Virginia as a research professor in the Social and Decision Analytics Division of the Biocomplexity Institute and Initiative.
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Jiang Xuemo
#155351
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Jiang Xuemo was a Chinese economist, translator and professor at Fudan University. During his 70-year academic career, Jiang has published more than 30 academic monographs, edited more than 10 textbooks and books on political economy, and translated more than 10 literary and economic works. He was the first Chinese to translate The Count of Monte Cristo. He was a member of the Communist Party of China .
Go to Profile#4182
José Manuel Restrepo Abondano
#169721
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
José Manuel Restrepo Abondano is a Colombian academic, economist, journalist and politician who served as the Minister of Finance and Public Credit from 3 May 2021 to 7 August 2022, he also served as Minister of Commerce, Industry and Tourism of Colombia since 7 August 2018 until 3 May 2021.
Go to Profile#4183
Douglas Cumming
#134470
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Douglas J. Cumming is a Canadian financial economist. He is the DeSantis Distinguished Professor and chair of the finance department in the College of Business at Florida Atlantic University in the United States.
Go to Profile#4184
Ralph Landau
#176575
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Ralph Landau was a chemical engineer and entrepreneur active in the chemical and petrochemical industries. He is considered one of the top fifty foundational chemical engineers of the first half of the 20th century, and one of the 75 most distinguished contributors to chemical enterprise. He has published extensively on chemical engineering and holds a significant number of patents.
Go to Profile#4185
Robin Feldman
#50662
Overall Influence
Robin Feldman is a law professor, researcher, and author best known for her contributions to intellectual property and health care law. Feldman is the Arthur J. Goldberg Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of Law Feldman is a widely cited expert on intellectual property and health care law, particularly as it relates to the pharmaceutical industry, drug policy, and drug pricing.
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Mark Drabenstott
#93633
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Mark Drabenstott is a vice-president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and the director of the Center for the Study of Rural America . Drabenstott is also chair of the National Policy Association's Food and Agriculture Committee and a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research at Harvard University.
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Jim Lee
#186275
Overall Influence
#4188
Graziella Bertocchi
#180048
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Graziella Bertocchi is an Italian economist and Professor of Economics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Modena, Italy. She is known for her work connecting economic growth within a historical perspective.
Go to Profile#4189
Benjamin Golub
#141248
Overall Influence
Benjamin Golub is an American economist who is a professor of economics and computer science at Northwestern University. His research focuses on the economics of networks. He was named the winner of the 2020 biannual Calvó-Armengol International Prize, which recognizes a “top researcher in [e]conomics or social sciences younger than 40 years old for contributions to the theory and comprehension of the mechanisms of social interaction.”
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Jeremy Baskin
#46474
Overall Influence
Jeremy Baskin is a specialist in sustainable business practice. He is a director of the University of Cambridge's Programme for Industry, running a global programme on Business & Poverty and a range of other programmes in Australia. Baskin is also a South African labour market analyst.
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Judith Shapiro
#180698
Overall Influence
Dr. Judith Shapiro is a Senior Lecturer in Practice in the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics. The main body of her work lies in Russian Transitional and Post-Transitional Economics as well as the Economics of Health and Population. More recently, she has also researched and discussed the economics of gender.
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David Maxwell
#97022
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
David Maxwell served as the 12th president of Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa from 1999 until 2015. He is the son of jazz trumpeter Jimmy Maxwell. Biography Maxwell served as president of Drake University from May 1999 through June, 2015, and held a faculty appointment as professor of literature. He was awarded the title of president emeritus by Drake's board of trustees upon his retirement. He was director of the National Foreign Language Center in Washington, D.C., from 1993 to 1999, after serving as president of Whitman College from 1989 to 1993. Maxwell was at Tufts University from 1...
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Masudul Alam Choudhury
#175051
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Masudul Alam Choudhury is a Bangladeshi-Canadian economist and International Chair in Islamic Economics and Finance at the Faculty of Economics, Trisakti University in Jakarta, Indonesia. Biography Masudul Alam Choudhury was born in Calcutta, India on January 1, 1948. He attended the universities of Dhaka, Islamabad, and Toronto for his advanced education in mathematics and economics, earning a PhD from the University of Toronto in 1977. He moved to Canada from Bangladesh and taught economics at Cape Breton University in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada for twenty two years.
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Julie Elston
#177567
Overall Influence
Dr. Julie Ann Elston is an American economist. She is a professor of business in the College of Business and an adjunct faculty member in the School of Agricultural and Resource Economics at Oregon State University. Dr. Elston graduated from the University of Washington's Department of Economics, and has held academic positions at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin in Germany, the Hoover Institution Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology, the Institut für Entrepreneurship und Innovation, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, and the Max Planck Institute for Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy.
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Paolo Fulghieri
#50141
Overall Influence
Paolo Fulghieri is an American economist, currently the Macon G. Patton Distinguished Professor of Finance at UNC Kenan–Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received his PhD and MA in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Laurea in economics from the Universita' Commerciale L. Bocconi in Milan.
Go to Profile#4196
Marianna Ivashina
#168229
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Marianna Ivashina is a Professor in Antenna Systems at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. Biography Marianna Ivashina received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Sevastopol National Technical University , Ukraine, in 2001. From 2001 to 2010 she was with The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy , where she carried out research on innovative phased array feed technologies for future radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometer Array , and APERTIF PAF system for the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope.
Go to Profile#4197
Noel Butlin
#144649
Overall Influence
1921 - 1991 (70 years)
Noel Butlin AC was a distinguished Australian economic historian, considered "one of the most outstanding Australian social scientists of his generation, and one of the major international figures in economic history." He was long associated with the Australian National University, the library of which has an archives centre that bears his name. His brother was Sydney James Butlin.
Go to Profile#4198
Grzegorz Michalski
#172572
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Grzegorz Marek Michalski is an economist, researcher at the School of Management, Computer Science and Finance at Wrocław University of Economics. His main area of research are Business Finance and Financial Liquidity Management. Grzegorz Marek Michalski is a professor of finance. Much of his research is aimed at understanding the determinants and dynamics of financial corporate liquidity. In his research, he has examined the firm value and cost of capital results of corporate liquidity management policies and results of demand for liquidity by firms. He has also investigated the effects of corporate liquidity on portfolio choice and corporate current assets decisions.
Go to Profile#4199
Milton Harris
#179354
Overall Influence
Milton Harris is an American mathematician and economist and is the Chicago Board of Trade Professor of Finance and Economics Emeritus at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Harris is an expert in the fields of corporate finance, corporate contract law, and applied economics. He is particularly interested in the economic theory of information and its effect on the firm and on organizations in general, and has done fundamental research in these areas.
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J. Wayne Reitz
#138563
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
Julius Wayne Reitz was an American agricultural economist, professor and university president. Reitz was a native of Kansas, and earned bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in his chosen field. After working as an agricultural economist, university professor and U.S. government agricultural administrator, Reitz was selected to be the fifth president of the University of Florida, serving from 1955 until 1967.
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