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,
#4501
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.
Go to Profile#4502
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.
Go to Profile#4503
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.
Go to Profile#4504
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.
Go to Profile#4505
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.
Go to Profile#4506
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.
Go to Profile#4507
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.
Go to Profile#4508
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.
Go to Profile#4509
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.
Go to Profile#4510
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.
Go to Profile#4511
Thomas Robert Malthus
#4512
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.
Go to Profile#4513
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.
Go to Profile#4514
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".
Go to Profile#4515
Karl William Kapp
1910 - 1976 (66 years)
Karl William Kapp was a German-American economist and professor of economics at the City University of New York and later the University of Basel. Kapp's main contribution was the development of a theory of social costs that captures urgent socio-ecological problems and proposes preventative policies based on the precautionary principle. His theory is in the tradition of various heterodox economic paradigms, such as ecological economics, Marxian economics, social economics, and institutional economics. As such, Kapp's theory of social costs was an ongoing debate with neoclassical economics and the rise of neoliberalism.
Go to Profile#4516
Max O. Lorenz
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
Max Otto Lorenz was an American economist who developed the Lorenz curve in an undergraduate essay. He published a paper on this when he was a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His doctoral thesis was on 'The Economic Theory of Railroad Rates' and made no reference to perhaps his most famous paper. The term "Lorenz curve" for the measure Lorenz invented was coined by Willford I. King in 1912.
Go to Profile#4517
Joseph A. Pechman
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Joseph Aaron Pechman was a highly influential economist and taxation scholar in the United States. He graduated from the City College of New York and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He served as president of the American Economic Association and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Go to Profile#4518
Otto Eckstein
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Otto Eckstein was a German-American economist. He was a key developer and proponent of the theory of core inflation , which proposed that in determining accurate metrics of long run inflation, the transitory price changes of items subject to volatile pricing, such as food and energy, are to be excluded from computation.
Go to Profile#4519
Werner Stark
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Werner Stark was a sociologist and economist, who made important contributions to the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, and the history of economic thought. Biography Werner Stark was born in Marienbad, Austrian Empire , to parents of Jewish origin. His father, Adolf Stark, was a physician for a miners' union and a socialist city council member. His birth was registered by the rabbi of Marienbad, but he was raised as an atheist. After completing his secondary education in Marienbad, he enrolled in the University of Hamburg to study economics and social sciences. While there, he met his wife-to be, Kate Franck who was also a student at the University.
Go to Profile#4520
Margaret G. Reid
1896 - 1991 (95 years)
Margaret Gilpin Reid was an economist in the area of household production, housework and non-market activities. Life Margaret Gilpin Reid was born in 1896 in Cardale, Manitoba in Canada, and completed a degree in Home Economics at the University of Manitoba in 1921. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1931 titled The Economics of Household Production. She taught at Connecticut College, Iowa State College and later the University of Chicago, where she received tenure as a Professor of Home Economics and Economics. She became emeritus in 1961.
Go to Profile#4521
Peter DeMarzo
1900 - Present (126 years)
Peter M. DeMarzo is an American economist. He was educated at the University of California, San Diego. Upon graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1984, DeMarzo pursued graduate study at Stanford University, finishing his master's degree and doctorate in 1984 and 1989, respectively. DeMarzo began teaching at the Kellogg School of Management in 1989, and remained on the faculty at Northwestern University through 1997. Between 1995 and 1997, he was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford, after which he secured an associate professorship at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#4522
Frederick Macaulay
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Frederick Robertson Macaulay was a Canadian economist of the Institutionalist School. He is known for introducing the concept of bond duration. Macaulay's contributions also include a mammoth empirical study of the time series behavior of interest rates published in 1938 and a study of short selling on the New York Stock Exchange . The term "Macaulay duration" is named after him.
Go to Profile#4523
Edward C. Kirkland
1894 - 1975 (81 years)
Edward Chase Kirkland was an American historian. He was a professor of Economics History at Bowdoin College, and the president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Association of University Professors.
Go to Profile#4524
David Littmann
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
David Littmann was an American cardiologist and Harvard Medical School professor and researcher. The name Littmann is well known in the medical field for the patented Littmann Stethoscope reputed for its acoustic performances for auscultation.
Go to Profile#4525
Theodore O. Yntema
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Theodore Otte Yntema was an American economist specializing in the field of quantitative analysis in finance. Education Yntema graduated summa cum laude in 1921 from Hope College as valedictorian. in 1922, he received his master's degree from the University of Illinois. Yntema received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1929.
Go to Profile#4526
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.
Go to Profile#4527
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.
Go to Profile#4528
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.
Go to Profile#4529
Rexford Tugwell
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Rexford Guy Tugwell was an American economist who became part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first "Brain Trust", a group of Columbia University academics who helped develop policy recommendations leading up to Roosevelt's New Deal. Tugwell served in FDR's administration until he was forced out in 1936. He was a specialist on planning and believed the government should have large-scale plans to move the economy out of the Great Depression because private businesses were too frozen in place to do the job. He helped design the New Deal farm program and the Resettlement Administration that moved subsistence farmers into small rented farms under close supervision.
Go to Profile#4530
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.
Go to Profile#4531
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...
Go to Profile#4532
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.
Go to Profile#4533
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.
Go to Profile#4534
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.
Go to Profile#4535
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...
Go to Profile#4536
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.
Go to Profile#4537
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.
Go to Profile#4538
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.
Go to Profile#4539
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.
Go to Profile#4540
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.
Go to Profile#4541
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.
Go to Profile#4542
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.
Go to Profile#4543
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...
Go to Profile#4544
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.
Go to Profile#4545
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.
Go to Profile#4546
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.
Go to Profile#4547
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.
Go to Profile#4548
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.
Go to Profile#4549
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 ...
Go to Profile#4550
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.
Go to Profile