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.
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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.
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K. C. Hsiao
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
K. C. Hsiao was a Chinese historian and political scientist, best known for his contributions to Chinese political science and history. Life and career Hsiao first travelled to the United States in 1920 on the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, remaining there for six years and earning a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1926. He returned to China and was professor of political science at Yenching University from 1930 to 1932, then at Tsinghua University from 1932 to 1937. With the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, he left to teach at Sichuan University and Kwang Hua University.
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Lloyd Metzler
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
Lloyd Appleton Metzler was an American economist best known for his contributions to international trade theory. He was born in Lost Springs, Kansas in 1913. Although most of his career was spent at the University of Chicago, he was not a member of the Chicago school, but rather a Keynesian.
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Clarence Edwin Ayres
1891 - 1972 (81 years)
Clarence Edwin Ayres was the principal thinker in the Texas school of institutional economics during the middle of the 20th century. Life Ayres was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the son of a Baptist minister. He graduated from Brown University in 1912, and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1917. He taught at Chicago from 1917 until 1920, and then moved on to Amherst College, in Massachusetts, where he taught until 1923. Following a year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Ayres became associate editor of the New Republic, where he worked until 1927. In that ye...
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Karl August Wittfogel
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Karl August Wittfogel was a German-American playwright, historian, and sinologist. He was originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, but after the Second World War, he was an equally fierce anticommunist.
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Abbott Payson Usher
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Abbott Payson Usher was an American economic historian. The Society for the History of Technology has awarded the Abbot Payson Usher Prize, named in his honor, annually since 1961. In the late 1920s Usher, the American historian Lewis Mumford and the Swiss art historian Sigfried Giedion began to systematically investigate the social consequences of technology. In A History of Mechanical Inventions Usher argued that technological innovation was a slow, collective process with many contributors, not relying on the genius of great inventors.
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Henry Calvert Simons
1899 - 1946 (47 years)
Henry Calvert Simons was an American economist at the University of Chicago. A protégé of Frank Knight, his antitrust and monetarist models influenced the Chicago school of economics. He was a founding author of the Chicago plan for monetary reform that found broad support in the years following the 1930s Depression, which would have abolished the fractional-reserve banking system, which Simons viewed to be inherently unstable. This would have prevented unsecured bank credit from circulating as a "money substitute" in the financial system, and it would be replaced with money created by the ...
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Sumner Slichter
1892 - 1959 (67 years)
Sumner Huber Slichter was an American economist and the first Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. Slichter was considered by many to be the pre-eminent labor economist of the 1940s and 1950s. Slichter was adamantly opposed to the labor movement, and called repeatedly for legislation against unionization. Slichter was also a critic of the New Deal."
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Karl Brunner
1916 - 1989 (73 years)
Karl Brunner was a Swiss economist. Biography Karl Brunner was born in Zürich on 16 February 1916. He studied economics at the University of Zürich from 1934 to 1937, and at the London School of Economics from 1937 to 1938, before returning to the University of Zürich, where he received a doctorate in 1943. He served briefly as an economist at the Swiss National Bank, and as a lecturer and research assistant at the University of St. Gallen. He left Switzerland in 1949 to take up a position as a visiting fellow at the Cowles Commission, then based at the University of Chicago. After a two-year...
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Ronald Shephard
1912 - 1982 (70 years)
Ronald William Shephard was Professor of Engineering Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for two results in economics, now known as Shephard's lemma and the Shephard duality theorem. Shephard proved these results in his book Theory of Cost and Production Functions , which Dale W. Jorgenson, in the preface of a reprint, called "the most original contribution to economic theory of all time."
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Ronald L. Meek
1917 - 1978 (61 years)
Ronald Lindley Meek was a Marxian economist and social scientist known especially for his scholarly studies of classical political economy and the labour theory of value. During the 1960s and 1970s, his writings had a strong influence on the Western academic discussion about Marx's economic theory.
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Mordecai Ezekiel
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Mordecai Joseph Brill Ezekiel was an American agrarian economist who worked for the United States government and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization . He was a "New Deal economic advisor" who shaped much of the President Franklin D. Roosevelt's agricultural policy.
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Philip Sargant Florence
1890 - 1982 (92 years)
Philip Sargant Florence was an American economist who spent most of his life in the United Kingdom. Life Born in Nutley, New Jersey in the United States, he was the son of Henry Smyth Florence, an American musician, and Mary Sargant Florence, a British painter. His sister was Alix Strachey. He was educated at Windlesham House School, Rugby School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before studying for his PhD at Columbia University in New York City. In 1917 he married the writer and birth control advocate Lella Faye Secor.
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Gerhard Tintner
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Gerhard Tintner was an Austrian economist who worked most of his career in the United States. Tintner is known for his contributions during the formation years of econometrics as a discipline. In a festschrift in honor of Tintner's 60th birthday, Karl A. Fox lauded Tintner as one of the "foremost econometricians of our time."
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Frank Ramsey
1903 - 1930 (27 years)
Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, as an undergraduate, translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English. He was also influential in persuading Wittgenstein to return to philosophy and Cambridge. Like Wittgenstein, he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the secret intellectual society, from 1921.
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Paul Rosenstein-Rodan
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Paul Narcyz Rosenstein-Rodan was an economist of Jewish origin born in Kraków, who was trained in the Austrian tradition under in Vienna. His early contributions to economics were in pure economic theory – on marginal utility, complementarity, hierarchical structures of wants and the pervasive Austrian School issue of time.
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Piero Sraffa
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Piero Sraffa, FBA was an influential Italian economist who served as lecturer of economics at the University of Cambridge. His book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is taken as founding the neo-Ricardian school of economics.
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Gottfried Haberler
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Gottfried von Haberler was an Austrian-American economist. He worked in particular on international trade. One of his major contributions was reformulating the Ricardian idea of comparative advantage in a neoclassical framework, abandoning the labor theory of value for an opportunity cost concept.
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Joseph Schumpeter
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian political economist. He served briefly as Finance Minister of Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at Harvard University, where he remained until the end of his career, and in 1939 obtained American citizenship.
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Joseph S. Davis
1885 - 1975 (90 years)
Joseph Stancliffe Davis was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at Stanford University and a long-time director of the newly established Food Research Institute. In 1944, he served as president of the American Economic Association. He was a member of President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers.
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Harold Hotelling
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Harold Hotelling was an American mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist, known for Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics, as well as Hotelling's T-squared distribution in statistics. He also developed and named the principal component analysis method widely used in finance, statistics and computer science.
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Friedrich Hayek
1899 - 1992 (93 years)
Friedrich August von Hayek , often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher who made contributions to economics, political philosophy, psychology, intellectual history, and other fields. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. His account of how prices communicate information is widely regarded as an important contribution to economics that led to him receiving the prize.
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Simon Kuznets
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Simon Smith Kuznets was an American economist and statistician who received the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development."
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Harry Gordon Johnson
1923 - 1977 (54 years)
Harry Gordon Johnson, was a Canadian economist who studied topics such as international trade and international finance. Nobel laureate James Tobin said about him: "For the economics profession throughout the world, the third quarter of this century was an Age of Johnson. ... It was his impact on his own profession ... that justifies calling the era his Age."
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Tjalling Koopmans
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Tjalling Charles Koopmans was a Dutch-American mathematician and economist. He was the joint winner with Leonid Kantorovich of the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the theory of the optimum allocation of resources. Koopmans showed that on the basis of certain efficiency criteria, it is possible to make important deductions concerning optimum price systems.
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Nancy Rose
Nancy Rose is an American economist, currently the Charles P. Kindleberger Professor and Head of the Department of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2014 to 2017, Rose served as the deputy assistant attorney general for economic analysis in the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice. Her research in the fields of industrial organization and the economics of regulation has covered a variety of industries, including airlines, electric utilities, and trucking.
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Abba P. Lerner
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Abraham "Abba" Ptachya Lerner was a Russian-born American-British economist. Biography Born in Novoselytsia, Bessarabia, Russian Empire, Lerner grew up in a Jewish family, which emigrated to Great Britain when Lerner was three years old. Lerner grew up in London's East End and from age 16 worked as a machinist, a teacher in Hebrew schools, and as an entrepreneur. In 1929, Lerner entered the London School of Economics, where he studied under Friedrich Hayek. A six-month stay at Cambridge in 1934–1935 brought him into contact with John Maynard Keynes. In 1937, Lerner emigrated to the United States.
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Fritz Machlup
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Fritz Machlup was an Austrian-American economist who was president of the International Economic Association from 1971 to 1974. He was one of the first economists to examine knowledge as an economic resource, and is credited with popularizing the concept of the information society.
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Horace Belshaw
1898 - 1962 (64 years)
Horace Belshaw was a New Zealand teacher, economist and university professor. He was born in Wigan, Lancashire, England on 9 February 1898. In 1935, he was awarded the King George V Silver Jubilee Medal.
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Ragnar Frisch
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Ragnar Anton Kittil Frisch was an influential Norwegian economist known for being one of the major contributors to establishing economics as a quantitative and statistically informed science in the early 20th century. He coined the term econometrics in 1926 for utilising statistical methods to describe economic systems, as well as the terms microeconomics and macroeconomics in 1933, for describing individual and aggregate economic systems, respectively. He was the first to develop a statistically informed model of business cycles in 1933. Later work on the model together with Jan Tinbergen wo...
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Jacob Viner
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Jacob Viner was a Canadian economist and is considered with Frank Knight and Henry Simons to be one of the "inspiring" mentors of the early Chicago school of economics in the 1930s: he was one of the leading figures of the Chicago faculty. Paul Samuelson named Viner as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860. He was an important figure in the field of political economy.
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Trevor Swan
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Trevor Winchester Swan was an Australian economist. He is best known for his work on the Solow–Swan growth model, published simultaneously by American economist Robert Solow, for his work on integrating internal and external balance as represented by the Swan Diagram, and for pioneering work in macroeconomic modeling, which predated that of Lawrence Klein but remained unpublished until 1989.
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Douglas Copland
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Sir Douglas Berry Copland was an Australian academic and economist. Biography Douglas Copland was born in Otago, New Zealand in 1894, the thirteenth of sixteen children. He was raised there and lived there till he was 21. In 1920, at the age of 26, he became Professor of Economics at the University of Tasmania. In 1924 Copland was appointed the Professor of Commerce and first Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce at the University of Melbourne. He was also the Truby Williams Professor of Economics at the University of Melbourne 1944–45.
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Jeff Borland
Jeff Borland is an Australian academic and labour economist. He is currently the Truby Williams Professor of Economics at the University of Melbourne. He received the 2020 Distinguished Fellow Award from the Economic Society of Australia.
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Oskar Morgenstern
1902 - 1977 (75 years)
Oskar Morgenstern was a German-born economist. In collaboration with mathematician John von Neumann, he founded the mathematical field of game theory as applied to the social sciences and strategic decision-making .
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Allen Schick
Allen Schick is a governance fellow of the Brookings Institution and also a professor of political science at the Maryland School of Public Policy of University of Maryland, College Park. He is known as an authority on budget theory and the federal budget process, in particular. His book, Congress and Money: Budgeting, Spending, and Taxing, won the D.B. Hardeman Prize in 1982.
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John Lintner
1916 - 1983 (67 years)
John Virgil Lintner, Jr. was a professor at the Harvard Business School in the 1960s and one of the co-creators of the capital asset pricing model. For a time, much confusion was created because the various economists working on this model independently failed to realize that they were saying much the same thing. They looked at the issue of capital asset valuation from different perspectives. William F. Sharpe, for example, approached the problem as an individual investor picking stocks. Lintner, on the other hand, approached it from the perspective of a corporation issuing shares of stock.
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Jacob Marschak
1898 - 1977 (79 years)
Jacob Marschak was an American economist. Life Born in a Jewish family of Kyiv, Jacob Marschak was the son of a jeweler. During his studies he joined the social democratic Menshevik Party, becoming a member of the Menshevik International Caucus. In 1918 he was the labor minister in the Terek Soviet Republic. In 1919 he emigrated to Germany, where he studied at the University of Berlin and the University of Heidelberg.
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Richard E. Quandt
1930 - 1974 (44 years)
Richard Emeric Quandt is a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning economist who analyzed the results of the Judgment of Paris wine tasting event with Orley Ashenfelter. Quandt served as a professor of economics at Princeton University. In 1979 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1991 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. He is current senior adviser to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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Alvin Hansen
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Alvin Harvey Hansen was an American economist who taught at the University of Minnesota and was later a chair professor of economics at Harvard University. Often referred to as "the American Keynes", he was a widely read popular author on economic issues, and an influential advisor to the government on economic policy. Hansen helped create the Council of Economic Advisors and the Social Security system. He is best remembered today for introducing Keynesian economics in the United States in the 1930s and 40s.
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Frank Knight
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Frank Hyneman Knight was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the founders of the Chicago School. Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, George Stigler and James M. Buchanan were all students of Knight at Chicago. Ronald Coase said that Knight, without teaching him, was a major influence on his thinking. F.A. Hayek considered Knight to be one of the major figures in preserving and promoting classical liberal thought in the twentieth century.
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Edward Chamberlin
1899 - 1967 (68 years)
Edward Hastings Chamberlin was an American economist. He was born in La Conner, Washington, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chamberlin studied first at the University of Iowa , then pursued graduate studies at the University of Michigan, eventually receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1927.
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Howard Bowen
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Howard Rothmann Bowen was an American economist and college president, serving as the president of Grinnell College from 1955 to 1964 and as the fourteenth President of the University of Iowa from 1964 to 1969. Bowen then served as president of Claremont Graduate University from 1970 to 1971. He is remembered for the formulation of "Bowen's law," a description of spending in higher education.
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Frederick V. Waugh
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Frederick Vail Waugh was an American agricultural economist known for his work relating supply, demand, quality, and marketing in the prices of agricultural products, for his understanding of who benefits from volatility in agricultural pricing, and for his advocacy of food stamp and food distribution policies for the poor. He worked for the United States Department of Agriculture from the 1920s to the 1970s.
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Charles Tiebout
1924 - 1968 (44 years)
Charles Mills Tiebout was an economist and geographer most known for his development of the Tiebout model, which suggested that there were actually non-political solutions to the free rider problem in local governance. He earned recognition in the area of local government and fiscal federalism with his widely cited paper “A pure theory of local expenditures”. He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1950, and received a PhD in economics in University of Michigan in 1957. He was Professor of Economics and Geography at the University of Washington. He died suddenly on January 16, 1968, at age 4...
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Alexander Gerschenkron
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Alexander Gerschenkron was an American economic historian and professor at Harvard University, trained in the Austrian School of economics. Born into a Jewish family in Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire, now in Ukraine, Gerschenkron fled the country during the Russian Civil War in 1920 to Austria, where he attended the University of Vienna, earning a doctorate in 1928. After the Anschluss in 1938, he emigrated to the United States.
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Arthur Melvin Okun
1928 - 1980 (52 years)
Arthur Melvin "Art" Okun was an American economist. He served as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers between 1968 and 1969. Before serving on the C.E.A., he was a professor at Yale University and, afterwards, was a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. In 1968 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
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Stephen Hymer
1934 - 1974 (40 years)
Stephen Herbert Hymer was a Canadian economist. His research focused on the activities of multinational firms, which was the subject of his PhD dissertation The International Operations of National Firms: A Study of Direct Foreign Investment, presented in 1960, but published posthumously in 1976, by the Department of Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Charles P. Kindleberger, his thesis supervisor, submitted it for publication, as mentioned by him on the introduction of Hymer's thesis dissertation.
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