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,
#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
Davis Rich Dewey
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Davis Rich Dewey was an American economist and statistician. He was born at Burlington, Vermont. Like his well-known younger brother, John Dewey, he was educated at the University of Vermont and Johns Hopkins University. He later became professor of economics and statistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was chairman of the Massachusetts state board on the question of the unemployed , member of the Massachusetts commission on public, charitable, and reformatory interests , special expert agent on wages for the 12th census, and member of a state commission on industrial rela...
Go to Profile#4455
Wolfgang Stützel
1925 - 1987 (62 years)
Wolfgang Stützel was a German economist and professor of economics at the Saarland University, Germany. From 1966 to 1968 he was member of the German Council of Economic Experts . He coined the concept of Macroeconomic Mechanics of Balances .
Go to Profile#4456
John Burr Williams
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
John Burr Williams was an American economist, recognized as an important figure in the field of fundamental analysis, and for his analysis of stock prices as reflecting their "intrinsic value". He is best known for his 1938 text The Theory of Investment Value, based on his PhD thesis, in which he articulated the theory of discounted cash flow based valuation, and in particular, dividend based valuation.
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Alfred H. Conrad
1924 - 1970 (46 years)
Alfred Haskell Conrad was a distinguished professor of economics at Harvard University and City College of New York. He belonged to the quantitative economic current called new economic history, or cliometrics.
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Emil Lederer
1882 - 1939 (57 years)
Emil Lederer was a Bohemiann-born German economist and sociologist. Purged from his position at Humboldt University of Berlin in 1933 for being Jewish, Lederer fled into exile. He helped establish the "University in Exile" at the New School in New York City.
Go to Profile#4459
Leopold von Wiese
1876 - 1969 (93 years)
Leopold Max Walther von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau was a German sociologist and economist, as well as professor and chairman of the German Sociological Association. Biography Leopold von Wiese was the only son of a prematurely deceased Prussian officer and received his education at the cadet schools in Wahlstatt and Lichterfelde. After leaving the cadet corps, he then studied economics at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin where he got his Ph.D. in 1902. Subsequently, he was scientific secretary of the "Institute for the common good" in Frankfurt. In 1905, he was Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#4460
Itsurō Sakisaka
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Itsurō Sakisaka was a Japanese Marxian economist. A professor of economics at Kyushu University, he is remembered as a leading theoretician of the Japan Socialist Party. Biography Sakisaka was born in Ōmuta, Fukuoka in 1897. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1921. When he was a university student, he read Karl Marx’s writings as a way to study German, and wound up becoming a Marxist. Sakisaka studied in Germany from 1922 to 1925. During the hyperinflation in Germany after World War I, he was able to purchase numerous editions of Karl Marx’s writings at low prices. After he returned to Japan, he became an assistant professor at Kyushu University.
Go to Profile#4461
Kuruma Samezō
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
Kuruma Samezō , September 24, 1893 -October 20, 1982 was a Japanese economist. He was professor emeritus at Hōsei University where he ran the Ōhara Institute for Social Research, and was best known as the compiler of a Lexicon of Marxist Political Economy. He is the father of Rikkyō University professor emeritus Kuruma Ken.
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Pierre Massé
1898 - 1987 (89 years)
Pierre Benjamin Daniel Massé was an economist, engineer, applied mathematician, and high official in the French government. Education and career After graduation from l'École polytechnique, Massé became an engineer at l'École nationale des ponts et chaussées and a Doctor of Science. From 1928 he worked in the electrical industry and became at Électricité de France in 1946 the director of electrical equipment and operations and in 1948 the deputy general manager. In 1957 he became president of l'Électricité de Strasbourg. In 1959 Charles de Gaulle named him Commissaire général du Plan and he held this position until 1966.
Go to Profile#4463
Johannes Conrad
1839 - 1915 (76 years)
Johannes Ernst Conrad was a German political economist. Johannes Conrad was a Professor of economics in Halle , Prussian Germany. He was a co-founder of the important Verein für Socialpolitik in 1872. Late in his career, in 1911, he became the director of the newly established Institute for Co-operative Studies at the University of Halle. Conrad was an expert in political economy and became the editor of the influential Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik in 1870.
Go to Profile#4464
Pietro Verri
1728 - 1797 (69 years)
Count Pietro Verri was an Italian economist, historian, philosopher and writer. Among the most important personalities of the 18th-century Italian culture, he is considered among the fathers of the Lombard reformist Enlightenment and the most important pre-Smithian authority on cheapness and plenty.
Go to Profile#4465
Ōuchi Hyōei
1888 - 1980 (92 years)
was a Japanese economist. Early life and education Ōuchi was born on August 29, 1888, in what is now Minaminawaji, Hyogo, Japan. After graduating from schools in Hyogo and Kumamoto, and earned a degree from Tokyo Imperial University.
Go to Profile#4466
Richard Whately
1787 - 1863 (76 years)
Richard Whately was an English academic, rhetorician, logician, philosopher, economist, and theologian who also served as a reforming Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. He was a leading Broad Churchman, a prolific and combative author over a wide range of topics, a flamboyant character, and one of the first reviewers to recognise the talents of Jane Austen.
Go to Profile#4467
Karl Rathgen
1856 - 1921 (65 years)
Karl Rathgen was a German economist. He was the first Chancellor of the University of Hamburg. After studying in Strasbourg, Halle, Leipzig and Berlin, he passed the first state examination in Naumburg in 1880 in Naumburg and earned his doctorate in 1882 with a thesis on the Making of markets in Germany from the University of Straßburg.
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Erik Lundberg
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Erik Filip Lundberg was a Swedish economist, born in Stockholm. He was a professor of political economics at Stockholm University and a member of the Stockholm School of economic thought. He was president of the International Economic Association from 1968 to 1971. From 1969 to 1979, he was a member of the committee that selects the laureates for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, the Economics Prize Committee, and served as the committee's chairman from 1975 to 1979.
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David Kinley
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
David Kinley was a Scotland-born economist who worked in the United States. He was head of the department of economics of the University of Illinois and later president of the University. As an economist, he was of the classical school, and his main interest was in money and banking. Administration gradually took up most of his time as his career progressed.
Go to Profile#4470
Tokuzō Fukuda
1874 - 1930 (56 years)
Tokuzō Fukuda was a pioneer of modern Japanese economics. Fukuda introduced economic theory and economic history for the Social Policy School and the Younger Historical school of economics. He graduated from the Tokyo Higher School of Commerce . After he was appointed lecturer of his alma mater, he studied in Germany, under Karl Bücher among others in the field, and he earned his doctorate from Munich University. His thesis dealt with the social and economic development in Japan and was supervised by Lujo Brentano.
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Taras Borodajkewycz
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Taras Borodajkewycz was a former member of the Nazi Party and, after World War II, professor of economic history at the College of World Trade in Vienna . He remained an unrepentant supporter of Nazism after the war and the pro-fascist views he allegedly expressed in his university lectures in the 1960s sparked major student demonstrations in Vienna that resulted in at least one fatality.
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Paul Haensel
1878 - 1949 (71 years)
Paul Haensel was Russian and American financier, economist and scholar. Early life Paul Haensel was born in Moscow in 1878 in the family of merchant. In 1902 he graduated Moscow Practical Commercial Academy. He became a professor of Moscow University in financial law department and in 1918-1920 he worked as a dean of the law school.
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Edith Abbott
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Edith Abbott was an American economist, statistician, social worker, educator, and author. Abbott was born in Grand Island, Nebraska. Abbott was a pioneer in the profession of social work with an educational background in economics. She was a leading activist in social reform with the ideals that humanitarianism needed to be embedded in education. Abbott was also in charge of implementing social work studies to the graduate level. Though she was met with resistance on her work with social reform at the University of Chicago, she ultimately was successful and was elected as the school's dean in 1924, making her one of the first female deans in the United States.
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William Jasper Spillman
1863 - 1931 (68 years)
William Jasper Spillman is considered to be the founding father of agricultural economics. In addition, he is notable for being the only American to independently rediscover Mendel's laws of genetics.
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Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Roscher
1817 - 1894 (77 years)
Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Roscher was a German economist from Hanover. Biography Roscher studied at Göttingen, where he became a member of Corps Hannovera, and Berlin, and obtained a professorship at Göttingen in 1844 and subsequently at Leipzig in 1848.
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Michael James Farrell
1926 - 1975 (49 years)
Michael James Farrell , was a Cambridge economist professionally known as M. J. Farrell. Academically he is remembered largely for the celebrated parametric measure of productive efficiency that he published in 1957.
Go to Profile#4477
F. A. Harper
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Floyd Arthur "Baldy" Harper was an American academic, economist and writer who was best known for founding the Institute for Humane Studies in 1961. Personal life Baldy Harper was born and raised in Middleville, Michigan and graduated from Michigan State University. He went on to obtain a doctorate in agricultural economics from Cornell University. Economist Herbert J. Davenport was influential to Harper during his time at Cornell.
Go to Profile#4478
Bruce Alan Mccarl
#4479
Giuseppe Ugo Papi
1893 - 1989 (96 years)
Giuseppe Ugo Papi was an Italian economist. Papi was among the contributors of the Fascist finance magazine Lo Stato from 1930. He was the rector of the University "La Sapienza" of Rome from November 1953 to May 1966. He was also a Knight of the Civil Order of Savoy and a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
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Bernhard Harms
1876 - 1939 (63 years)
Christoph Bernhard Cornelius Harms was a German economist and one of the first professors to undertake research in the field of international economics. He founded the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Germany's leading economic research institute, in 1914. Harms was Chair of Economics at the University of Kiel and head of the Institute until he was dismissed from office in 1933 by Nazi Party officials.
Go to Profile#4481
Samson Olajuwon Kokumo Olayide
1928 - 1984 (56 years)
Samson Olajuwon Kokumo Olayide , was an academic and professor of agricultural economics. Olayide was born to Josiah Ogunpoopo Olayide and Mariam Olayide . He married Theresa Folashade Olayide in 1961. And gave birth to four children [Biodun, Tokunbo, Oluwole, and Olajide]
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Mykhailo Volobuiev
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Mykhailo Symonovych Volobuiev was a Ukrainian economist of Russian origin of the 1930s. He was a researcher at the Research Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kharkiv and a major contributing thinker and advocate for the economic self-sufficiency of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
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Theodore Gregory
1890 - 1970 (80 years)
Sir Theodore Emmanuel Gugenheim Gregory was a British economist. Biography Theodore Gregory was born in London on 10 September 1890. Gregory was educated at Dame Alice Owen's School in Islington. He attended the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gregory was an Assistant and Lecturer at the LSE between 1913 and 1919. Gregory was Cassel Reader in International Trade at the LSE in 1920. Gregory was Sir E. Cassel Professor of Economics in the University of London between 1927 and 1937. He was Dean of the Faculty of Economics at London University between 1927 and 1930. Gregory was a Senator of London University between 1928 and 1930.
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Wilhelm Abel
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Wilhelm Abel was a German economist. He is particularly noted for his contributions to agricultural economics and economic history. Abel's first and most well known book was Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur published originally in 1935. It details the agrarian history of Europe from the 13th to the 20th centuries, focusing on periods of expansion and contraction corresponding to population. Other notable works include Die Wüstungen des ausgehenden Mittelalters, a study of medieval abandoned villages, Geschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft, a history of German rural life and economy, and Mass...
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Adam Heydel
1893 - 1941 (48 years)
Adam Zdzisław Heydel was a Polish economist and representative of the Cracow School of Economics, a type of economic liberalism. Biography Early life and education Adam Heydel was the son of Zdzisław and Maria Heydel, his brother named Wojciech. He was a student at John III Sobieski High School and later studied in Moscow and Kyiv. In 1922 he studied law at the Jagiellonian University, where he got his doctorate. In the years 1921–1922 he worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1925 he got a habilitation in the field of political economy. Two years later he became a lecturer of economi...
Go to Profile#4486
David Davidson
1854 - 1942 (88 years)
David Davidson was a Swedish economist. He was professor of economics and taxation law at Uppsala University from 1890 to 1919. He founded and edited the journal Ekonomisk Tidskrift . Via the journal, Davidson has been credited with switching Swedish economic analysis from one that followed the German Historicist approach to one in which Anglo-American style economic theory played a more dominant role.
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Albert Gallatin
1761 - 1849 (88 years)
Abraham Alfonse Albert Gallatin was a Genevan–American politician, diplomat, ethnologist and linguist. Often described as "America's Swiss Founding Father", he was a leading figure in the early years of the United States, helping shape the new republic's financial system and foreign policy. Gallatin was a prominent member of the Democratic-Republican Party, represented Pennsylvania in both chambers of Congress, and held several influential roles across four presidencies, most notably as the longest serving U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. He is also known for his contributions to academia, nam...
Go to Profile#4488
Eugen Schmalenbach
1873 - 1955 (82 years)
Eugen Schmalenbach was a German academic and economist. He was born in Halver, and attended the Leipzig College of Commerce starting in 1898. That college later became part of Leipzig University, only to emerge again as the Handelshochschule Leipzig.
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Robert Lee Hale
1884 - 1969 (85 years)
Robert Lee Hale was an American lawyer and economist. He earned an economics degree at Harvard University, and then worked at Columbia Law School. He is known as a legal realist, and his work focused particularly on the distributive impact of legal rules.
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Albert B. Wolfe
1876 - 1967 (91 years)
Albert Benedict Wolfe was an American economist. Life Wolfe was born in 1876. He died in 1967. Career He has served as a president of the American Economic Association. Bibliography Some of his books are:Readings in social problems Savers' surplus and the interest rateSocial problems, an analytical outline for students Works committees and Joint industrial councils
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E. Wight Bakke
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
Edward Wight Bakke was an American sociology and economics professor at Yale University who achieved prominence in the field of industrial relations. He was a Sterling Professor, Yale's highest level of academic rank, and served as director of the Yale Labor and Management Center from its founding in 1945 until its dissolution in the late 1950s. The author, co-author, or co-editor of thirteen books, Bakke made major contributions to the study of unemployment and organizational theory.
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Georg Obrecht
1547 - 1612 (65 years)
Georg Obrecht was a German law professor and prominent developer of Cameralist thought. Biography Obrecht was born in 1547. He studied law at a variety of universities, including Tübingen, Heidelberg, Besançon, Dôle, and Orléans. After escaping death as a Protestant amidst the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, he returned to Strasbourg and eventually obtained a professorship at his own high school.
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Robert Hale Merriman
1908 - 1938 (30 years)
Robert Hale Merriman was an American doctoral student who fought with the Republican forces in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. He was killed while commanding the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades.
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Charles Rist
1874 - 1955 (81 years)
Charles Rist was a French economist. He was elected an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1932 and an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1938. His son is Léonard Rist.
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Harold Thayer Davis
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
Harold Thayer Davis was a mathematician, statistician, and econometrician, known for the Davis distribution. Davis received in 1915 his A.B. from Colorado College, in 1919 his A.M. from Harvard University, and in 1926 his PhD under Edward Burr Van Vleck from the University of Wisconsin, after working there as a mathematics instructor from 1920 to 1923. From 1923 to 1937 he taught mathematics at the Indiana University Bloomington, becoming a professor there. From February to August 1937 he was acting research director of the Cowles Commission. Davis became a professor in 1937 at Northwestern University in the mathematics department and the chair of the department in 1942.
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Henry B. Gardner
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
Henry Brayton Gardner was an American economist. He was a faculty member at Brown University from 1890 until 1928, serving as the first Eastman Professor of Political Economy from 1919 to 1928. In 1919, he served as president of the American Economic Association.
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Edmund J. James
1855 - 1925 (70 years)
Edmund Janes James was an American academic, president of the University of Illinois from 1904 to 1920, and the primary founder, first president and first editor for the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He also served as the 7th president of Northwestern University from 1902 to 1904.
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Vasily Sergeevich Nemchinov
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
#4499
William Fellner
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
William John Fellner was a Hungarian-American economist and Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University from 1952 until his retirement in 1973. Born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, he studied at the University of Budapest, the ETH Zurich and the Frederick William University in Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 1929, . Fellner served on the Council of Economic Advisers from 1973 to 1975.
Go to Profile#4500
Alexander Ivanovich Chuprov
1842 - 1908 (66 years)
Alexander Ivanovich Chuprov was a professor of political economy and statistics at Moscow University whose lectures provided the standard introduction to economics for late 19th-century Russian students.
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