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.
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List of the most influential people in Economics,
#4501
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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Charles F. Roos
1901 - 1958 (57 years)
Charles Frederick Roos was an American economist who made contributions to mathematical economics. He was one of the founders of the Econometric Society together with American economist Irving Fisher and Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch in 1930. He served as Secretary-Treasurer during the first year of the Society and was elected as President in 1948. He was director of research of the Cowles Commission from September 1934 to January 1937.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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,...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Charles L. Beach
1866 - 1933 (67 years)
Charles Lewis Beach was an American agricultural educator who served as the 4th president of Connecticut Agricultural College, now the University of Connecticut, from 1908 to 1928. Beach played a pivotal role in UConn's development. He also laid the foundations for the future William Benton Museum of Art. Beach is one of only five presidents to hold the honorary title of President Emeritus.
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James Wilson
1805 - 1860 (55 years)
James Wilson was a Scottish businessman, economist, and Liberal politician who founded The Economist weekly and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, which merged with Standard Bank in 1969 to form Standard Chartered. He was the first Finance Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council from December 1859 until his death in August 1860. Sent there to put order into the chaos that followed the "Sepoy Mutiny" of 1857, he presented India's first budget, and was responsible for the government accounting system, Pay Office, and audit, apart from government paper currency, Indian Police, a...
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Thomas Swain Barclay
1892 - 1993 (101 years)
Thomas Swain Barclay was a professor of political science at Stanford University. He taught five U.S. senators and countless other Stanford University students over three decades. Barclay was born into a politically active Democratic family in St. Louis, Missouri.
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Alex Hunter
1919 - 1971 (52 years)
Alexander Hunter was a Scottish-Australian industrial economist. He arrived in Australia in 1958 after being appointed a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne. He then gained prominence as the editor of The Economics of Australian Industry. He became a professor of economics at the University of New South Wales in 1961, then moving to the Australian National University in 1965. He was a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies. He was married to Thelma Anna Carmela Cibelli and had three children. Hunter died of a coronary occlusion during a visit t...
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Ernest Boyd MacNaughton
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Ernest Boyd MacNaughton was president of the First National Bank of Oregon , then chairman , president of The Oregonian publishing company , and president of Reed College . He is the namesake of the ACLU E.B. MacNaughton Civil Liberties Award.
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William Cunningham Smith
1871 - 1943 (72 years)
William Cunningham Smith was an American academic of English literature, university administrator, and writer. Life and career Born in Greensboro, Smith was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He attended graduate school at Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 1900 he came to the State Normal and Industrial College as a professor of English, and in 1904 he became head of the department. In 1905, Smith became Dean of the College, in 1915 Dean of the Faculty, and in 1922 Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. During his tenure at the College he was chairman of chapel and conducted devotional services.
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Carl Heinrich Hagen
1785 - 1856 (71 years)
Carl Heinrich Hagen was a jurist, socio-economist and, between 1811 and 1835, senior government official . From 1811 he was also a professor of jurisprudence and the University of Königsberg in what was at that time East Prussia.
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Hugo Richard Meyer
1866 - 1923 (57 years)
Hugo Richard Meyer was an American author and economist concerned with public ownership of telegraph, phone, railway and other utilities. Biography Meyer graduated from Harvard College in 1892, and attended the Harvard Graduate School in 1892-96 where he received an A.M. in 1894. He was instructor in political economy at Harvard in 1897-1903, and was assistant professor in that subject at the University of Chicago in 1904-05. After 1907, he resided in Melbourne where he was writing a history of state ownership in Victoria, Australia.
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George Grafton Wilson
1863 - 1951 (88 years)
George Grafton Wilson was a distinguished professor of International Law during the first half of the 20th century. He served on the faculties of Brown University, Harvard University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the U.S. Naval War College.
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Werner von Siemens
1816 - 1892 (76 years)
Ernst Werner Siemens was a German electrical engineer, inventor and industrialist. Siemens's name has been adopted as the SI unit of electrical conductance, the siemens. He founded the electrical and telecommunications conglomerate Siemens and invented the electric tram, trolley bus, electric locomotive and electric elevator.
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John Lee Coulter
1881 - 1959 (78 years)
John Lee Coulter was an American academic. He assumed several roles within the federal government, and served as president of the North Dakota Agriculture College from 1921 to 1929. Coulter was born in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, on April 16, 1881, and attended the University of North Dakota before earning his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1908. He began teaching at the University of Minnesota later that year. Coulter started working for the federal government in 1910, leading the U. S. Census of Agriculture. He helped establish the system of banks and credit unions for rural use under the provisions of the Federal Farm Loan Act.
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Andrew Dewar Gibb
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Andrew Dewar Gibb MBE QC was a Scottish advocate, barrister, professor and politician. He taught law at Edinburgh and Cambridge, and was Regius Professor of Law at the University of Glasgow 1934–1958. Gibb was the leader of the Scottish National Party from 1936 to 1940.
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Johannes Broene
1875 - 1967 (92 years)
Johannes Broene was an academic and twice served as president of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, US. He was born in Muskegon, Michigan, and his father was a minister of the Christian Reformed Church. Broene attended the University of Michigan and Valparaiso University, from which he graduated in 1906. He went on to do graduate work at Clark University and pursued his doctorate at Clark, while working as a teacher and later principal of Christian schools in Paterson, New Jersey, and Chicago, Illinois. He joined the Calvin College faculty in 1908, teaching primarily in Philosophy and Education.
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Kenneth Hill
1911 - 1973 (62 years)
Kenneth Robson Hill was a British academic and academic administrator. He was educated at Washington Secondary School and King's College London. He was Professor of Pathology at University College of the West Indies from 1949 to 1956. He also served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Benin, Nigeria however his tenure was cut short because of ill health He was a member of the Athenaeum Club.
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Boris Brutskus
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Boris Davydovich Brutskus was an economist from the Russian Empire. Brutskus was born in Polangen/Palanga in Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire. His brother was the historian and politician Julius Brutzkus.
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Ke Shaomin
1850 - 1933 (83 years)
Ke Shaomin , courtesy name Fengsun , also known by his art name Liaoyuan , was a Chinese historian from Jiaozhou, Shandong. He is most known for writing the New History of Yuan, one of the Twenty-Five Histories, and helping to lead the compilation of the Draft History of Qing. He was a secretary in the Qing dynasty court in its final years.
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Friedrich Lütge
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Friedrich Lütge was a German economist, social historian and economic historian. He taught at the Leipzig Graduate School of Management and at the University of Leipzig between 1940 and 1947, then moving on to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he taught till a few months before he died. Through his research work between 1949 and 1968 he exercised a great influence on the understanding of economic history in West Germany. Together with Wilhelm Abel and Günther Franz he contributed decisively to research into agrarian history in Germany. He was instrumental in ensuring that soci...
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Redvers Opie
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Redvers Opie was a British economist. On the recommendation of John Maynard Keynes, he became the United Kingdom Treasury representative in Washington, D.C., as Counsellor and economic adviser at the British Embassy, 1939–46, and was one of the five members of the UK delegation to the Bretton Woods Conference, which gave birth to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
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Athanasios Asimakopulos
1930 - 1990 (60 years)
Athanasios "Tom" Asimakopulos was a Canadian economist, who was the "William Dow Professor of Political Economy" in the Department of Economics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His monograph, Keynes's General Theory and Accumulation, reviews important areas of Keynes's General Theory and the theories of accumulation of two of his most distinguished followers, Roy Harrod and Joan Robinson.
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Robert A. Brady
1901 - 1963 (62 years)
Robert Alexander Brady was an American economist who analyzed the dynamics of technological change and the structure of business enterprise. Brady developed a potent analysis of fascism and other emerging authoritarian economic and cultural practices. His essential work is "about power and the organization of power around the logic of technology as operated under capitalism", yielding insights and understanding of modern society's careening path between enhancing or destroying "life and culture".
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Morris Copeland
1895 - 1989 (94 years)
Morris Albert Copeland was a US economist who criticized 20th-century macroeconomic theory, and who contributed to the development of modern flow of funds theory. Life Born and raised in Rochester New York, Copeland began his university education at Amherst with an interest in philosophy and Greek. Late in his undergraduate studies he encountered teachers Walter W. Stewart and Walton Hamilton and became fascinated with social accounting and economics. After graduating in 1917 he went on to the University of Chicago for his graduate studies where he came under the influence of Wesley Mitchell, a man who he came to regard as his mentor and good friend.
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John B. Condliffe
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
John Bell Condliffe was a New Zealand economist, university professor and economic consultant. Lauded for the decisive role he played in international NGOs in the interwar period, he was one of New Zealand's best-known international economists.
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Paul Nystrom
1878 - 1969 (91 years)
Paul Henry Nystrom was an American economist, and professor of marketing at Columbia University. He is most known as pioneer in marketing, and for his The Economics of Retailing and his Economics of Fashion .
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John Piggott
John Reginald Piggott is an Australian economist. He is the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research at the University of New South Wales, Australia, where he is Scientia Professor of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
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Edwin E. Witte
1887 - 1960 (73 years)
Edwin Emil Witte was an economist who focused on social insurance issues for the state of Wisconsin and for the Committee on Economic Security. While the executive director of the President's Committee on Economic Security under U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he developed during 1934 the policies and the legislation that became the Social Security Act of 1935. Because of this he is sometimes called "the father of Social Security".
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