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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Economics,
#4451
Monte S. Nyman
#94602
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Monte Steven Nyman was president of Southern Virginia University from 2003 to 2004. He had previously been academic vice president at SVU and a professor of religion at Brigham Young University . As a young man Nyman served a mission in the North Central States Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . Nyman received bachelor's and master's degrees in physical education from Utah State University. He later received a doctorate from BYU in educational administration. Prior to joining the BYU faculty, he was an Institute of Religion director in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
Go to Profile#4452
William Bradshaw, Baron Bradshaw
#140350
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
William Peter Bradshaw, Baron Bradshaw , commonly known as Bill Bradshaw, is a British academic and politician. A Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords, he was formerly also a County Councillor in Oxfordshire from 1993 until his resignation in January 2008.
Go to Profile#4453
Zabihollah Safa
#25871
Overall Influence
1911 - 1999 (88 years)
Zabihollah Safa was a scholar and professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at the University of Tehran. His main contribution to the field of Iranian studies is seen in his seminal and comprehensive works on the history of Persian literature. He was also a regular contributor to the Encyclopaedia Iranica.
Go to Profile#4454
Erik Lindahl
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Erik Lindahl was a Swedish economist. He was professor of economics at Uppsala University 1942–58 and in 1956–59 he was the President of the International Economic Association. He was an also an advisor to the Swedish government and the central bank, and in 1943 was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Lindahl posed the question of financing public goods in accordance with individual benefits. The quantity of the public good satisfies the requirement that the aggregate marginal benefit equals the marginal cost of providing the good.
Go to Profile#4455
John Ulric Nef
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
John Ulric Nef, Jr. was an American economic historian, and the co-founder of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. He was associated with the University of Chicago for over half a century, and co-founded the Committee there in 1941.
Go to Profile#4456
A. E. Levett
1881 - 1932 (51 years)
Ada Elizabeth Levett , known professionally as A. E. Levett, was an Oxford-educated native of Bodiam, Sussex, who became a pioneering woman economic historian specialising in medieval feudalism. Levett was Vice Principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford, and later took up an appointment to a history chair at Westfield College at the University of London.
Go to Profile#4457
Siegfried von Ciriacy-Wantrup
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Siegfried von Ciriacy-Wantrup was a German academic. Born in Langenberg, Germany in 1906. After doing his master's work in Illinois, he returned to Bonn to get his Ph.D. in 1931. In 1936, he left Nazi Germany for the United States, arriving at UC Berkeley and the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics in 1938.
Go to Profile#4458
Alvin Saunders Johnson
1874 - 1971 (97 years)
Alvin Saunders Johnson was an American economist and a co-founder and first director of The New School. Biography Alvin Johnson was born near Homer, Nebraska. He was educated at the University of Nebraska and Columbia . Afterwards, he was employed in various positions at Columbia, the University of Nebraska, the University of Texas, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and at Cornell after 1913.
Go to Profile#4459
Gabriel Hauge
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Gabriel Hauge was a prominent American bank executive and economist. Hauge served as assistant to the president for economic affairs during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Background Gabriel Hauge was born in Hawley, Minnesota. He was the son of Reverend Søren G. Hauge, a Lutheran minister and an immigrant from Sandane in Sogn og Fjordane, Norway. Hauge earned a B.A. from Concordia College in 1935, an M.A. from Harvard University in 1938, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1947.
Go to Profile#4460
Fredy Perlman
1934 - 1985 (51 years)
Fredy Perlman was an American author, publisher, and activist. His best-known work, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, retells the historical rise of state domination through the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan.
Go to Profile#4461
Federico Caffè
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
Federico Caffè was a notable Italian economist from the Keynesian School. Early life Caffè graduated in Business Sciences from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1936. After World War II, he spent one year in the United Kingdom studying at the London School of Economics. During that period, he came in contact with the Keynesian Economics and saw up close the policies implemented by the then Labour government. Back in Italy, he started his career working at the Bank of Italy, later becoming a teacher at the University of Messina. From 1959 he taught Economic and Financial Policy at the Univ...
Go to Profile#4462
Kermit Gordon
1916 - 1976 (60 years)
Kermit Gordon was Director of the United States Bureau of the Budget during the administration of John F. Kennedy. He continued to serve in this capacity in the Lyndon Johnson administration. He oversaw the creation of the first budgets for Johnson's Great Society domestic agenda. Gordon was a member of the Council of Economic Advisors, 1961–1962. After he retired from government service, he joined the Brookings Institution, first as vice president and then as its president for nearly a decade . During his tenure, Brookings developed a left-of-center reputation chiefly because Gordon was a...
Go to Profile#4463
John Thomas Madden
1882 - 1948 (66 years)
John Thomas Madden A.M., C.P.A., Ph.D. was an educator and business leader who served as the dean of NYU School of Business, introduced much of the modern procurement process, and served as president of Theta Nu Epsilon from 1926-1932 and Beta Alpha Psi, the finance, accounting and information systems fraternity from 1930–1932.
Go to Profile#4464
Kozo Uno
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Kozo Uno was a Japanese economist and is considered one of the most important theorists on the field of Marx's theory of value. He is an influential Marxist economist in Japan, where his school of thought is called the Uno School . His main work Principles of Economics [経済原論] was published in 1950-52. Among his scholars are Thomas T. Sekine and Makoto Itoh.
Go to Profile#4465
William Harold Hutt
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
William Harold Hutt was an English economist who described himself as a classical economist. Early life Hutt was born into a working-class, but educated family in London, where his father was a compositor. After he completed high school during the height of the First World War, he began training as a pilot, but abandoned his training at the end of the war.
Go to Profile#4466
Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Viktor Valentinovich Novozhilov was a Soviet economist and mathematician, known for his development of techniques for the mathematical analysis of economic phenomena. He was awarded the Lenin Prize and served as head of the Laboratory for Economic Assessment Systems at the Leningrad office of the Central Economic Mathematical Institute.
Go to Profile#4467
Gustaf Åkerman
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Johan Gustaf Åkerman was a Swedish economist who was Professor of Political Economy in what was to later become the University of Gothenburg. He was the elder brother to Swedish economist Johan Henrik Åkerman. His work, in particular the Åkerman problem, played in an important role in the development of Wicksell's work on the role of capital. And was, according to Velupillai, one of the first to approach the problem of fixed capital as a joint product - work that was later developed by Piero Sraffa and John von Neumann
Go to Profile#4468
Maurice Bourguin
1856 - 1910 (54 years)
Maurice Marie Victor Bourguin was a French professor of Law. Bouguin started his career at the University of Douai where he taught administrative law. He moved to the University of Lille Works "Des rapports entre Proudhon et Marx" in Revue d'Economie Politique, Paris, March 1893, Vol. 7, No. 3 pp 177–207La mesure de la valeur et la monnaie Les systèmes socialistes et l'évolution économique
Go to Profile#4469
William Allison Shimer
1894 - 1983 (89 years)
William Allison Shimer was an American professor of philosophy. From 1932 to 1943 he served as the first editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Society's literary journal, The American Scholar. After a stint as president of Marietta College, he spent the latter part of his life teaching in Hawaii and working for the World Brotherhood, an international organization founded under the auspices of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
Go to Profile#4470
Tord Palander
1902 - 1972 (70 years)
Tord Folkeson Palander was a Swedish economist. His Ph.D. thesis, Beiträge zur Standortstheorie , completed in 1935 at the Stockholm University College, laid foundations to regional science. Palander first studied chemical engineering at the Royal Institute of Technology, and graduated in 1926. He then started to study economics at the Stockholm University College. In 1941, Palander became a professor at the Gothenburg School of Business, Economics and Law, and in 1948 at the University of Uppsala.
Go to Profile#4471
Alfons Goldschmidt
1879 - 1940 (61 years)
Alfons Goldschmidt was a German journalist, economist and university lecturer. Alfons was born in Gelsenkirchen. He was finance editor for Rudolf Mosse's Berliner Tageblatt, and held the chair of economics at the University of Leipzig.
Go to Profile#4472
Henry Clay
1883 - 1954 (71 years)
Sir Henry Clay was a British economist and Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford. Clay was educated at the Bradford Grammar School and University College, Oxford. Between 1917 and 1919 Clay worked as a temporary civil servant at the Ministry of Labour, where he worked closely with Harold Butler. From 1919 and 1921 he was a fellow of New College, Oxford. In 1922 he became the Stanley Jevons Professor of Political Economy at the University of Manchester; in 1927 he became Professor of Social Economics at the University of Manchester. Between 1930 and 1944 he worked as an economic adviser to the Ba...
Go to Profile#4473
Paul Brandon Barringer
1857 - 1941 (84 years)
Paul Brandon Barringer was an American physician and college administrator, the sixth president of Virginia Tech, serving from September 1, 1907 through July 1, 1913. He was also chairman of the faculty at the University of Virginia from 1895 through 1903. He made major changes to the medical curriculum at U.Va, adding requirements for clinical training, as was common in Europe.
Go to Profile#4474
Stanislav Strumilin
1877 - 1974 (97 years)
Stanislav Gustavovich Strumilin was a Soviet economist and statistician. He played a leading role in the analysis of the planned economy of the Soviet type, including modeling, development of the five year planss and calculation of national income. His particular contributions include the "Strumilin index", a measure of labor productivity, and the "norm coefficient", relating to analysis of investment activity.
Go to Profile#4475
Vida Dutton Scudder
1861 - 1954 (93 years)
Julia Vida Dutton Scudder was an American educator, writer, and welfare activist in the social gospel movement. Early life She was born in Madurai, India, on December 15, 1861, the only child of David Coit Scudder and Harriet Louise Scudder. After her father, a Congregationalist missionary, was accidentally drowned in 1862, she and her mother returned to the family home in Boston. Apart from travel in Europe, she attended private secondary schools in Boston, and was graduated from the Boston Girl's Latin School in 1880. Scudder then entered Smith College, where she received her BA degree i...
Go to Profile#4476
T. S. Ashton
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Thomas Southcliffe Ashton was an English economic historian. He was professor of economic history at the London School of Economics at the University of London from 1944 until 1954, and Emeritus Professor until his death in 1968. His best known work is the 1948 textbook The Industrial Revolution , which put forth a positive view on the benefits of the era.
Go to Profile#4477
Adolph Lowe
1893 - 1995 (102 years)
Adolph Lowe was a German sociologist and economist. His best known student was Robert Heilbroner. He was born in Stuttgart and died in Wolfenbüttel. Major publications of Adolph Lowe Arbeitslosigkeit und Kriminalität, 1914."Zur Methode der Kriegswirtschaftsgesetzgebung", 1915, Die Hilfe"Die freie Konkurrenz", 1915, Die HilfeWirtschaftliche Demobilisierung, 1916."Mitteleuropäische Demobilisierung", 1917, Wirtschaftszeitung der Zentralmächte."Die ausführende Gewalt in der Ernährungspolitik", 1917, Europäische Staats- und Wirtschaftszeitung"Die Massenpreisung im System der Volksernährung", 1917,...
Go to Profile#4478
Feliks Młynarski
1884 - 1972 (88 years)
Feliks Młynarski was a Polish banker, philosopher and economist. Biography Feliks Młynarski was born to Jan Młynarski, a school teacher, and Honorate née Dziurzyńska. He attended a gymnasium in Jarosław, but because of his involvement in organizing meetings in favor of Polish independence, he was expelled by the Austrian authorities, and had to finish his secondary education at a school in Sanok, in 1903.
Go to Profile#4479
Luigi Fontana Russo
1868 - 1953 (85 years)
Luigi Fontana Russo was an Italian economist and lecturer. Career Since 1907 he taught trade policy and customs law at the University of Rome. It was part of the school luzzattiana. From 1913 to 1919 he was Rector of the Royal Institute of Business Studies and Administrative Sapienza University of Rome. From 1928 he taught economic policy. He continued teaching until 1938. He was also President of the Bank of Italy. He organized the Federation of Italian owners.
Go to Profile#4480
Karl Marx
1818 - 1883 (65 years)
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume ; the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism and represents his greatest intellectual achievement. Marx's ideas and theories and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have exerted enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
Go to Profile#4481
Alfred Marshall
1842 - 1924 (82 years)
Alfred Marshall was an English economist, and was one of the most influential economists of his time. His book Principles of Economics was the dominant economic textbook in England for many years. It brought the ideas of supply and demand, marginal utility, and costs of production into a coherent whole. He is known as one of the founders of neoclassical economics.
Go to Profile#4482
John Hicks
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Sir John Richard Hicks was a British economist. He is considered one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS–LM model , which summarised a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. His book Value and Capital significantly extended general-equilibrium and value theory. The compensated demand function is named the Hicksian demand function in memory of him.
Go to Profile#4483
Vilfredo Pareto
1848 - 1923 (75 years)
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto was an Italian polymath . He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term "elite" in social analysis.
Go to Profile#4484
Ludwig von Mises
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was an Austrian–American Austrian School economist, historian, logician, and sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberalism and the power of consumers. He is best known for his work on praxeology studies comparing communism and capitalism.
Go to Profile#4485
Joan Robinson
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Joan Violet Robinson was a British economist known for her wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. One of the most prominent economists of the century, Joan Robinson incarnated the "Cambridge School" in most of its guises in the 20th century: she started as a cutting-edge Marshallian and after 1936; as one of the earliest and most ardent Keynesians and finally as one of the leaders of the Neo-Ricardian and Post Keynesian schools. Robinson's contributions to economics are far too numerous to elucidate fairly. Unlike most economists, she was not a "one idea" person, but rather made many many fundamental contributions to very different areas of economics.
Go to Profile#4486
Léon Walras
1834 - 1910 (76 years)
Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras was a French mathematical economist and Georgist. He formulated the marginal theory of value and pioneered the development of general equilibrium theory. Walras is best known for his book Éléments d'économie politique pure, a work that has contributed greatly to the mathematization of economics through the concept of general equilibrium. The definition of the role of the entrepreneur found in it was also taken up and amplified by Joseph Schumpeter.
Go to Profile#4487
Carl Menger
1840 - 1921 (81 years)
Carl Menger von Wolfensgrün was an Austrian economist and the founder of the Austrian School of economics. Menger contributed to the development of the theories of marginalism and marginal utility, which rejected cost-of-production theory of value, such as developed by the classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. As a departure from such, he would go on to call his resultant perspective, the subjective theory of value.
Go to Profile#4488
Arthur Cecil Pigou
1877 - 1959 (82 years)
Arthur Cecil Pigou was an English economist. As a teacher and builder of the School of Economics at the University of Cambridge, he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to take chairs of economics around the world. His work covered various fields of economics, particularly welfare economics, but also included business cycle theory, unemployment, public finance, index numbers, and measurement of national output. His reputation was affected adversely by influential economic writers who used his work as the basis on which to define their own opposing views. He reluctantly...
Go to Profile#4489
William Stanley Jevons
1835 - 1882 (47 years)
William Stanley Jevons was an English economist and logician. Irving Fisher described Jevons's book A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy as the start of the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics, as a science concerned with quantities, is necessarily mathematical. In so doing, it expounded upon the "final" utility theory of value. Jevons' work, along with similar discoveries made by Carl Menger in Vienna and by Léon Walras in Switzerland , marked the opening of a new period in the history of economic thought. Jevons's contribution to the marginal ...
Go to Profile#4490
Thorstein Veblen
1857 - 1929 (72 years)
Thorstein Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. In his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class , Veblen coined the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. Historians of economics regard Veblen as the founding father of the institutional economics school. Contemporary economists still theorize Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology", known as the Veblenian dichotomy.
Go to Profile#4491
Gunnar Myrdal
1898 - 1987 (89 years)
Karl Gunnar Myrdal was a Swedish economist and sociologist. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences along with Friedrich Hayek for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." When his wife, Alva Myrdal, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982, they became the fourth ever married couple to have won Nobel Prizes, and the first and only to win independent of each other .
Go to Profile#4492
Irving Fisher
1867 - 1947 (80 years)
Irving Fisher was an American economist, statistician, inventor, eugenicist and progressive social campaigner. He was one of the earliest American neoclassical economists, though his later work on debt deflation has been embraced by the post-Keynesian school. Joseph Schumpeter described him as "the greatest economist the United States has ever produced", an assessment later repeated by James Tobin and Milton Friedman.
Go to Profile#4493
David Hume
1711 - 1776 (65 years)
David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiric...
Go to Profile#4494
Nicholas Kaldor
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor , born Káldor Miklós, was a Cambridge economist in the post-war period. He developed the "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons , derived the cobweb model, and argued for certain regularities observable in economic growth, which are called Kaldor's growth laws. Kaldor worked alongside Gunnar Myrdal to develop the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multicausal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated. Both Myrdal and Kaldor examine circular relationships, where the interdependencies betwee...
Go to Profile#4495
Knut Wicksell
1851 - 1926 (75 years)
Johan Gustaf Knut Wicksell was a Swedish economist of the Stockholm school. His economic contributions would influence both the Keynesian and Austrian schools of economic thought. He was married to the noted feminist Anna Bugge.
Go to Profile#4496
John Neville Keynes
1852 - 1949 (97 years)
John Neville Keynes was a British economist and father of John Maynard Keynes. Biography Born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, Keynes was the child of John Keynes and his wife Anna Maynard Neville . He was educated at Amersham Hall School, University College London and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow in 1876. He held a lectureship in Moral Sciences from 1883 to 1911. He was elected as Registrary in 1910, and held that office until 1925.
Go to Profile#4497
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
1845 - 1926 (81 years)
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s. From 1891 onward, he was appointed the founding editor of The Economic Journal.
Go to Profile#4498
John R. Commons
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
John Rogers Commons was an American institutional economist, Georgist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Early years John R. Commons was born in Hollansburg, Ohio on October 13, 1862. Commons had a religious upbringing which led him to be an advocate for social justice early in life. Commons was considered a poor student and suffered from a mental illness while studying. He was allowed to graduate without finishing because of the potential seen in his intense determination and curiosity. At this time, Commons became a follower of Henry George's 'single tax' economics.
Go to Profile#4499
John Bates Clark
1847 - 1938 (91 years)
John Bates Clark was an American neoclassical economist. He was one of the pioneers of the marginalist revolution and opponent to the Institutionalist school of economics, and spent most of his career as professor at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#4500
Michał Kalecki
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Michał Kalecki was a Polish Marxian economist. Over the course of his life, Kalecki worked at the London School of Economics, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford and Warsaw School of Economics and was an economic advisor to the governments of Poland, France, Cuba, Israel, Mexico and India. He also served as the deputy director of the United Nations Economic Department in New York City.
Go to Profile