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,
#4251
Abner Vernon McCall
#136733
Overall Influence
1915 - 1995 (80 years)
Abner Vernon McCall was a justice of the Supreme Court of Texas in 1956, Dean of Baylor Law School from 1948 to 1959, and the tenth president of Baylor University from 1961 to 1981. Biography McCall was born June 8, 1915, in Perrin, Texas. After his father's death and his mother's failing health, he was sent to the Masonic School and Home in Fort Worth. He gained a scholarship to attend Baylor University and graduated in law in 1938. From 1938 to 1942, he was an assistant professor at Baylor. In 1943, he received an LL.M from the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile#4252
Robert Prichard
#174088
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
John Robert Stobo Prichard, is a Canadian lawyer, economist, and academic. He is the past president and chief executive officer and former director of Torstar Corporation. He is now the chairman of the Bank of Montreal.
Go to Profile#4253
Murray Brown
#124211
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Murray George Brown is a full professor at Dalhousie University. The Dalhouse University credits Murray Brown with over 50 refereed journals, conference abstracts, proceedings, and major reports. Brown holds post-retirement appointments in the College of Pharmacy and the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie University.
Go to Profile#4254
Darren T. Roulstone
#182235
Overall Influence
Darren T. Roulstone is John W. Berry, Sr. Fund for Faculty Excellence Professor of Accounting at Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, and has been director of its Accounting and Management Information Systems PhD program since 2008. His current research interests are textual analysis of firms’ financial disclosures and how investors acquire accounting information.
Go to Profile#4255
Robert Graboyes
#95393
Overall Influence
Robert F. Graboyes is an economist, journalist, and musician at RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. Author of Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care and publisher of Bastiat's Window on Substack, he writes on the technology and politicization of healthcare. He has taught health economics and in 2014 received the Reason Foundation's Bastiat Prize for Journalism.
Go to Profile#4256
Ichak Adizes
#168058
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Ichak Kalderon Adizes is a Yugoslav American business consultant and former tenured professor. Early life Ichak Adizes was born in North Macedonia. As a Jewish child during World War II, he hid as a Muslim for protection in Albania. The story was documented in a film entitled I Want To Remember, He Wants To Forget.
Go to Profile#4257
Víctor Aguirre-Torres
#175834
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Victor M. A. Aguirre-Torres is an internationally recognized econometrician, professor and researcher of the Academic Department of Statistics at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México . He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences . Since 1991, he has formed a significant number of leaders in México, with nearly 46 generations to his credit.
Go to Profile#4258
Steven Altman
#59707
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Steven Altman is an American professor and academic administrator. He served as president of the NewSchool of Architecture and Design in San Diego, CA from 2006 to 2013. He previously served as the third president of the University of Central Florida from 1989 to 1991.
Go to Profile#4259
Bob Parker
#73909
Overall Influence
1932 - 2016 (84 years)
Robert Henry Parker was a British accounting scholar, and Emeritus Professor at the University of Exeter, known for his work on "comparative international accounting" and the history of the accounting profession in Britain.
Go to Profile#4260
James C. Brau
#117035
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
James Carl Brau is an American economist, focusing in issues pertaining to initial public offerings, entrepreneurial finance, and real estate, currently the Joel C. Peterson Professor of Finance at Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University.
Go to Profile#4261
George Shultz
#143113
Overall Influence
1920 - 2021 (101 years)
George Pratt Shultz was an American economist, businessman, diplomat and statesman. He served in various positions under two different Republican presidents and is one of the only two persons to have held four different Cabinet-level posts, the other being Elliot Richardson. Shultz played a major role in shaping the foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration and advancing the lies used to defraud investors in Theranos.
Go to Profile#4262
Dov S. Zakheim
#171566
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Dov S. Zakheim is an American businessman, writer, and former official of the United States government. In the Reagan administration, he held various Department of Defense positions. In 2000, Zakheim was a member of "The Vulcans", a group of foreign policy advisors assisting George W. Bush's presidential campaign. From 2001 to 2004 he was Under Secretary of Defense and Chief Financial Officer of the Department of Defense.
Go to Profile#4263
Rüdiger Fahlenbrach
#137594
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Rüdiger Fahlenbrach is a German economist specialised in finance. He is a professor of finance at EPFL and holds the Swiss Finance Institute Senior Research Chair. Career From 1995 to 1999, Fahlenbrach studied business administration at the University of Mannheim in Germany and at the ESSEC Business School in France. He then pursued a PhD in finance with Andrew Metrick at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 2004, he graduated with a PhD thesis "Essays in Corporate Governance". Afterwards he joined the Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University as an assista...
Go to Profile#4264
Leora Klapper
#177683
Overall Influence
Leora F. Klapper is an American economist who currently works as a lead economist at the World Bank in the Finance and Private Sector research team as part of the Development Research group. Klapper has held government jobs in Washington, DC and Jerusalem, Israel in the Bank of Israel, as well as having held private sector jobs for Peter L. Bernstein and the Salomon Brothers firm in New York. She is also the founder of The Global Findex Database and Entrepreneurship Database.
Go to Profile#4265
William F. Shughart II
#184968
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
William Franklin Shughart II is an American economist who is the J. Fish Smith Professor in Public Choice at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. He is research director and senior fellow at The Independent Institute. He is the editor-in-chief of Public Choice, senior associate editor of the Southern Economic Journal and associate editor of the Independent Review.
Go to Profile#4266
James R. Brown
#188667
Overall Influence
#4267
John Chartres
#179463
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
John Anthony Chartres is the former professor of economic and social history at the University of Leeds. He is a specialist in the economic history of agriculture in England. Selected publications Books Internal trade in England, 1500-1700. Macmillan, London, 1977. Pre-Industrial Britain. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1994. Agricultural Markets and Trade, 1500-1750. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Go to Profile#4268
Dennis Lees
#188684
Overall Influence
1924 - 2008 (84 years)
Dennis Samuel Lees CBE was a British economist. He is known for his work in industrial economics and the economics of personal injury. Biography Lees's first academic post was at the University College of North Staffordshire . In 1965 he became Professor of Economics at the University of Swansea. He joined the University of Nottingham in 1968 as Professor of Industrial Economics and Head of the Department. He served on the National Insurance Advisory Committee and became Chairman of the Industrial Injuries Advisory Council.
Go to Profile#4269
Michael Cooper
#128269
Overall Influence
1938 - 2017 (79 years)
Michael Hymie Cooper was a British-born economist and one of the first to develop the field of health economics in the 1960s. He later moved to the University of Otago in New Zealand. Biography Cooper took a position as senior chair in economics at the University of Otago in 1976, where he established the university's first health economics class. He worked at the university for 18 years, becoming pro vice-chancellor. He chaired the Otago Area Health Board. In 1990 he was awarded the New Zealand 1990 Commemoration Medal, and in the 1994 New Year Honours, he was appointed an Officer of the Or...
Go to Profile#4270
Peter Bloom
#156992
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Peter Bloom is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. He obtained his BA in music at Swarthmore College, his Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Pennsylvania, and studied the oboe with John de Lancie at the Curtis Institute of Music.
Go to Profile#4271
Fred Bateman
#113814
Overall Influence
1937 - 2012 (75 years)
James Fred Bateman, Jr. was a noted economic historian. He served as the Nicholas A. Beadles Professor in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. Bateman's main areas of research were US 19th century agricultural and industrial economic history. He served from 1982–83 as president of the Business History Conference and in 2010 he was elected as a Fellow of the Cliometric Society.
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Ganna Pogrebna
#179933
Overall Influence
Ganna Pogrebna is a British behavioral data scientist, decision theorist, educator, author, and academic writer. She currently serves as the Lead for Behavioral Data Science at the Alan Turing Institute, the Executive Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Cyber Futures Institute at Charles Sturt University, and an Honorary Professor of Behavioral Business Analytics and Data Science at the University of Sydney.
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Sebastián Piñera
#158662
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Miguel Juan Sebastián Piñera Echenique is a Chilean billionaire businessman and politician who served as president of Chile from 2010 to 2014 and again from 2018 to 2022. The son of a Christian Democratic politician and diplomat, he studied business administration at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and economics at Harvard University. As of January 2023, he had an estimated net worth of $2.7 billion, according to Forbes, making him one of the richest people in Chile.
Go to Profile#4274
Steven Williams
#188779
Overall Influence
#4275
Ye Tan
#147356
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Ye Tan is a Chinese economist and a research professor at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences since 1988. In 2012, she was appointed as an adjunct professor at Peking University School of Economics. She is a member of the NSFC peer councillor, member of the 19th-century Japanese Society for Economic and Social Studies, and vice president of the Chinese Association of historic Economic Thought. She is the director of the Academy of History of Chinese Economic Thought.
Go to Profile#4276
William Tsutsui
#60157
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
William M. Tsutsui is an American academic, author, economic historian, Japanologist and university administrator. He was named President and CEO of Ottawa University, May 3, 2021, and took office July 1, 2021.
Go to Profile#4277
Jan de Vries
#63027
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Jan de Vries is a Dutch economic historian. He is Professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his work on the Industrial Revolution and European urbanization, as well as the economic history of the Netherlands. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2002.
Go to Profile#4278
Miriam A. Golden
#179626
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Miriam A. Golden is a political scientist and the Peter Mair Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute. Her research focuses on the selection, responsiveness, and accountability of politicians in Asia, Europe, Africa and North America.
Go to Profile#4279
Knut Seip
#86302
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Knut Lehre Seip is professor in environmental management at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. Seip obtained his masters in physics at the University of Oslo, UiO, in 1969. He obtained his ph.D at UiO in 1992 with the thesis “Mathematical models of lake ecosystems.” Seip has served at several positions at Center for industrial research, SI / SINTEF. Professor Seip held the first chair in Environmental management in Norway, at Telemark University College 1994-2000, then he became professor and head of Research and Management at Oslo University College. From 2011 he has been professor and...
Go to Profile#4280
Grant Reuber
#186729
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Grant Louis Reuber, was a Canadian economist, academic, civil servant, and businessman. Early life and education Born in Mildmay, Ontario, the son of Jacob Daniel and Gertrude Catherine Reuber, Reuber attended Walkerton High School. He received an honours Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the University of Western Ontario in 1950. He received his master's degree in Economics from Harvard University in 1954 and his Ph.D in 1957.
Go to Profile#4281
Michael R. Reich
#188888
Overall Influence
#4282
David Roselle
#41055
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
David Paul Roselle is an American mathematician and academic administrator who served as the ninth president of the University of Kentucky and the 25th president of the University of Delaware. Early life and family David Roselle was born in Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. He married Louise Helen Dowling, a native of Manhasset, New York, in 1967. The couple has two children, Arthur and Cynthia .
Go to Profile#4283
Nicolas Ziebarth
#185200
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Nicolas Robert Ziebarth is a university professor at the University of Mannheim and the ZEW- the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research. Since 2022, he is head of their Research Unit "Labour Markets and Social Insurance." Since its founding in 2021, he served as a tenured Associate Professor in Cornell's Brooks School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor and then tenured Associate Professor in Cornell's Department of Policy Analysis and Management.
Go to Profile#4284
Daniel Rees
#184896
Overall Influence
1931 - 2007 (76 years)
Daniel I. Rees is an American economist who currently serves as Professor of Economics at the [[Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ]]. His research interests presently include health and labour economics.
Go to Profile#4285
Gustavo A. Mellander
#23273
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Gustavo "Gus" Adolfo Mellander is a leader in the field of university and college administration in the United States. He served as dean of academic affairs and interim chancellor at Inter American University of Puerto Rico, 1966–69, dean of York College, 1969–72, president of Passaic College in New Jersey from 1975 to 1985, president of Mission College, 1985, chancellor of the West Valley-Mission College District in California from 1985 to 1992, and subsequently as Dean of a Graduate School at George Mason University. In 1981 he was appointed by the governor of New Jersey to the State Board of Education.
Go to Profile#4286
James C. Robinson
#111428
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
James Claude Robinson is a professor of health economics at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, where he has the title of the Leonard D. Schaeffer Endowed Chair in Health Economics and Policy. Robinson is also the Chair of the Berkeley Center for Health Technology, which supports research and professional education projects related to coverage, management, and payment methods for innovative technologies including biopharmaceuticals, medical devices, and diagnostics.
Go to Profile#4287
Richard R. Nelson
#189118
Overall Influence
#4288
Harbir Singh
#81579
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Harbir Singh is an American economist, currently the Co-Director, Mack Institute for Innovation Management and Mack Professor of Management at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and formerly the Edward H. Bowman Professor, from 1999 to 2005.
Go to Profile#4289
Pavel Ipatov
#181629
Overall Influence
1914 - 1994 (80 years)
Pavel Fyodorovich Ipatov was a Russian economist and financial scientist, the vice-rector of the Moscow Institute of Finance , PhD in economics, professor. Biography Ipatov was born in Chernigov Governorate in 1914 into a worker's family. After losing his parents early in his childhood, Pavel was brought up in the family of an older brother in Schelkovo, Moscow Oblast
Go to Profile#4290
Sofiane Bouhdiba
#128473
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Sofiane Bouhdiba is a Tunisian demographer, born on 12 April 1968. He is Professor of Demography in the department of Sociology in the University of Tunis. He has taught in many universities in Europe, Africa and the United States, and has participated in a great number of international conferences, with a focus on mortality and morbidity. As an international consultant to the United Nations, he had the opportunity to observe closely the history of the fight against major diseases in the world. He has also participated in numerous scientific and humanitarian missions in sub-Saharan Africa. Pr...
Go to Profile#4291
María del Carmen Guisán
#188030
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
María del Carmen Guisán is a professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela and one of the 20 most influential Spanish economists according to the newspaper El Confidencial. She is currently the editor of the academic journal Applied Econometrics and International Development.
Go to Profile#4292
Renée Mauborgne
#30624
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Renée Mauborgne is an American economist and business theorist. She is a professor of strategy at INSEAD, a business school based in France. Mauborgne is also the co-director of the Fontainebleau-based INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. She is known as co-author of the 2005 book Blue Ocean Strategy.
Go to Profile#4293
Gwyneth Dow
#101174
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
Gwyneth Dow was an Australian educator, notable for her contributions to the Australian education system. Early life Dow was born Gwyneth Maude Terry in Melbourne. She took her BA and a Diploma Education in 1957, completing a Master in Education in 1961 and a Doctor's in Education in 1984.
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José Ignacio Goirigolzarri
#177386
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
José Ignacio Goirigolzarri Tellaeche is a Spanish economist and executive. He is the current Chairman of CaixaBank since 2021 and Chairman of the state-owned holding BFA. From 2012 to 2021 he served as Chairman of Bankia and from 2001 to 2009 as chairman and COO of BBVA.
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Jean Trepp McKelvey
#177673
Overall Influence
1908 - 1998 (90 years)
Jean Trepp McKelvey was an American economist specialising in arbitration and industrial relations. McKelvey was an esteemed tenure professor at Sarah Lawrence College and Cornell University where at the latter she was a founding faculty member for the School of Industrial and Labor Relations , developing the curriculum and teaching five courses including arbitration, labor law and labor practices. Coined the "mother of arbitration", in 1947 McKelvey was the first woman admitted to the National Academy of Arbitrators, in 1970 became its first woman president and established an arbitration training program for women and minorities.
Go to Profile#4296
Joseph E. Schwartz
#189339
Overall Influence
#4297
Michal Grinstein-Weiss
#185683
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Michal Grinstein-Weiss, PhD, MSW, MA, is the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis where she is also serves as the Associate Dean for Policy Initiatives, the director of the university-wide Social Policy Institute, and the founding director of the Centene Center for Health Transformation. She serves as a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She previously held positions as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she established the Asset-Building Research ...
Go to Profile#4298
Hu Peizhao
#115712
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Hu Peizhao was a Chinese economist and a professor at Xiamen University. He served as Director of the Institute of Economic Research and Dean of the College of Economics at the university, and as an economic advisor to the national government of China. In 1985, he was among the first economists to win the Sun Yefang Prize, China's highest honour in economics.
Go to Profile#4299
Henry S. Coleman
#66219
Overall Influence
1926 - 2006 (80 years)
Henry Simmons Coleman was an American educational administrator who was serving as acting dean of Columbia College, Columbia University when he was held hostage in an office for a day by the Students for a Democratic Society during the Columbia University protests of 1968 and later wrote letters of recommendation to law school for some of the students involved in the protests. In 1972, he was shot five times by a disgruntled student who had been asked to withdraw from the university due to poor grades.
Go to Profile#4300
John F. Carney
#134052
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
John F. Carney III was chancellor of Missouri University of Science and Technology from 2005 to 2011. Carney received his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Merrimack College in 1963 and a master's in 1964. He received a Ph.D. civil engineering from Northwestern University in 1966. He taught at the University of Connecticut from 1966 to 1981 when he became head of the civil engineering department at Auburn University. He moved to Vanderbilt University in 1983 and was associate dean for graduate affairs and then associate dean for research and graduate affairs . He was provost and...
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