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,
#4601
Leo Rogin
1893 - 1947 (54 years)
Leo Rogin was an American economist, economic historian and historian of economic thought. Major publications "The Introduction of Farm Machinery in its Relation to the Productivity of Labor in the Agriculture of the United States During the 19th Century", 1931."Werner Sombart and the 'Natural Science Method' in Economics", JPE, 1933."American Economic Thought", AER, 1933."The New Deal: A Survey of the Literature", QJE, 1935."Davenport on the Economics of Alfred Marshall", AER, 1936."The Significance of Marxian Economics for Current Trends of Government Policy", AER, 1938."Werner Sombart and ...
Go to Profile#4602
Harry Gideonse
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Harry David Gideonse was a Dutch-born American economist. He was the second President of Brooklyn College, from 1939 to 1966, and Chancellor of the New School for Social Research from 1966 until 1975.
Go to Profile#4603
Oswald Knauth
1887 - 1962 (75 years)
Oswald Whitman Knauth was an economist and business executive. Knauth served as an executive at both R. H. Macy & Co. and Associated Dry Goods Corporation . He helped found the National Bureau of Economic Research. Knauth also served as president of the board of directors of the American Economic Association and as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Go to Profile#4604
Karl Brandt
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Karl Brandt was a German-American agricultural economist. Brandt was born in Essen. He fled from Germany to the U.S. in 1933, shortly after the Nazi regime came to power. He was successively a professor and researcher at the New School for Social Research, the American Institute for Food Distribution, and Stanford University .
Go to Profile#4605
Clara Eliot
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Clara Eliot was an economist known for her work in consumer economics. She taught economics at Barnard College for many years. Biography Eliot was born in 1896, the granddaughter of Thomas Lamb Eliot and part of a prominent Unitarian branch of the Eliot family. She did her undergraduate studies at Reed College, which her grandfather had founded, graduating in 1917. She taught at Mills College from 1917 to 1918, and then worked as an assistant to Yale economist Irving Fisher from 1918 to 1920. She also worked as an elementary school teacher; one of her students from this time, Margaret E. Mart...
Go to Profile#4606
Frank Hindman Golay
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Frank Hindman Golay was an American economist. Golay was born in Windsor, Missouri, on July 2, 1915, and served in the United States Navy during World War II. After his military service, Golay obtained a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1951, and worked for the Federal Reserve Board until 1953, when he joined the Cornell University as an assistant professor of economics and Asian studies. In 1960, Golay received a Guggenheim fellowship. He was named chair of the Cornell Department of Economics in 1963, and left the position in 1967. He taught at SOAS, University of London as a visiting professor on a Fulbright grant from 1965 to 1966.
Go to Profile#4607
John Warren
1895 - 1960 (65 years)
John Herbert Warren OBE, was a British trade unionist. Warren studied at the University of Liverpool before finding work in the clerks' department of Birkenhead Corporation. In 1933, he was promoted to become an assistant solicitor, then served as town clerk in Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, followed by Slough. From 1933 to 1945, he also worked as a part-time lecturer at the University of Liverpool.
Go to Profile#4608
Paul Homan
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Paul Thomas Homan was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at Cornell University from 1929 to 1947. Early life Homan was born in Indianola, Iowa. Homan earned bachelor's degrees from Willamette College, and with a Rhodes Scholarship, the University of Oxford, graduating in 1919. He earned a PhD at the Brookings Institution in 1926.
Go to Profile#4609
Edward S. Mason
1899 - 1992 (93 years)
Edward Sagendorph Mason was an American economist and professor at Harvard University. He was the Dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration, now known as the John F. Kennedy School of Government, from 1947 to 1958. He was the president of the American Economic Association in 1962.
Go to Profile#4610
Miguel Sidrauski
1939 - 1968 (29 years)
Miguel Sidrauski was an Argentine economist who made important contributions to the theory of economic growth by developing a modified version of the Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans model to describe the effects of money on long-run growth. He also published an article on exchange rate determination. Sidrauski taught economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#4611
Gordon Cameron
1937 - 1990 (53 years)
Gordon Campbell Cameron was a British economist and academic. He was Professor of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge from 1980 to 1990, and Master of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge from 1988 to 1990.
Go to Profile#4612
Stephen Leacock
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Stephen P. H. Butler Leacock was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humorist. Between the years 1915 and 1925, he was the best-known English-speaking humorist in the world. He is known for his light humour along with criticisms of people's follies.
Go to Profile#4613
Oscar Elton Sette
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Oscar Elton Sette , who preferred to be called Elton Sette, was an influential 20th-century American fisheries scientist. During a five-decade career with the United States Bureau of Fisheries, United States Fish and Wildlife Service and its Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and the National Marine Fisheries Service, Sette pioneered the integration of fisheries science with the sciences of oceanography and meteorology to develop a complete understanding of the physical and biological characteristics of the ocean environment and the effects of those characteristics on fisheries and fluctuations in the abundance of fish.
Go to Profile#4614
Persia Campbell
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Persia Gwendoline Crawford Campbell was an Australian-born American economist who championed consumer rights worldwide. Early life Persia Crawford Campbell, was born March 15, 1898, at Nerrigundah, New South Wales. She was the daughter of school teachers, Rodolfe Archibald Clarence Campbell and his second wife Beatrice Hunt. Persia was educated in Sydney at Fort Street Girls' High School before going on to university, where she took her B.A from the University of Sydney in 1918, followed by her M.A. in 1920. She had obtained first-class honours in history.
Go to Profile#4615
Eugen Dühring
1833 - 1921 (88 years)
Eugen Karl Dühring was a German philosopher, positivist, antisemite, economist, and socialist who was a strong critic of Marxism. Life and works Dühring was born in Berlin, Prussia. After a legal education he practised at Berlin as a lawyer until 1859. A weakness of the eyes, ending in total blindness, occasioned his taking up the studies with which his name is now connected. In 1864, he became docent of the University of Berlin, but, in consequence of a quarrel with the professoriate, was deprived of his licence to teach in 1874.
Go to Profile#4616
Charles Cobb
1875 - 1949 (74 years)
Charles Wiggins Cobb was an American mathematician and economist and a 1912 Ph.D. graduate of the University of Michigan. He published many works on both subjects, however he is most famous for developing the Cobb–Douglas production function in economics. He worked on this project with the economist Paul H. Douglas while lecturing at Amherst College in Massachusetts. In 1928, Charles Cobb and Paul Douglas published a study in which they modeled the growth of the American economy during the period 1899–1922. They considered a simplified view of the economy in which production of output is determined by the amount of labor involved and the amount of capital used.
Go to Profile#4617
François Perroux
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
François Perroux was a French economist, specialist of the globalisation. He was named Professor at the Collège de France, founded in 1530 by King of France Francis I. Before, he taught at the University of Lyon and the University of Paris . He is credited by creating the word 'gobalisation" in his essays from the early 1960s . He founded the in 1944. He was an outspoken supporter of corporatism.
Go to Profile#4618
Gardiner Means
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Gardiner Coit Means was an American economist who worked at Harvard University, where he met lawyer-diplomat Adolf A. Berle. Together they wrote the seminal work of corporate governance, The Modern Corporation and Private Property. During the New Deal, Means served as an economic adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry A. Wallace.
Go to Profile#4619
Tadao Yanaihara
1893 - 1961 (68 years)
Tadao Yanaihara was a Japanese economist, educator and Christian pacifist. The first director of Shakai Kagaku Kenkyūjo at the University of Tokyo, he studied at Toynbee Hall and School of Economics and Political Science .
Go to Profile#4620
Alan Coddington
1941 - 1982 (41 years)
Alan Coddington was an English academic who made significant contributions to the field of economics in the areas of collective bargaining, Keynesian economics, and economic methodology. Coddington was born in Doncaster, got his BSc degree in 1963 from Leeds University, and DPhil in 1966 from University of York. He took up teaching at the University of London, Queen Mary College, in 1966, where he remained until his death in London in 1982, aged just 40. At that institution, he built his reputation in the area of Keynesian Economics. His focus was on first principles, in which he added notabl...
Go to Profile#4621
Albert Aftalion
1874 - 1956 (82 years)
Albert Abram Aftalion was a French economist. He taught at the Paris University . He co-founded the academic journal Revue économique in 1950 and presided over its board of directors. Literary works Les crises périodiques de surproduction, 1913
Go to Profile#4622
Hajime Kawakami
1879 - 1946 (67 years)
Hajime Kawakami was a Japanese Marxist economist of the Taishō and early Shōwa periods. Biography Born in Yamaguchi, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University. After writing for Yomiuri Shimbun, he attained a professorship in economics at Kyoto Imperial University. Increasingly inclined toward Marxism, he participated in the March 15 incident of 1928 and was expelled from the university as a subversive. The following year, he joined the formation of a political party, Shinrōtō. Kawakami went on to publish a Marxist-oriented economics journal, Studies of Social Problems. After joining the outlawed Japanese Communist Party, he was arrested in 1933 and sent to prison.
Go to Profile#4623
Scott Nearing
1883 - 1983 (100 years)
Scott Nearing was an American radical economist, educator, writer, political activist, pacifist, vegetarian and advocate of simple living. Biography Early years Nearing was born in Morris Run, Tioga County, Pennsylvania, the heart of the state's coal country. Nearing's grandfather, Winfield Scott Nearing, had arrived in Tioga County with his family in 1864, at the age of 35, when he accepted a job as a civil and mining engineer. Before the end of the year he had assumed full control of mining operations as the superintendent of the Morris Run Coal Company, a position of authority which he held for the remainder of his working life.
Go to Profile#4624
John Henry Williams
1887 - 1980 (93 years)
John Henry Williams was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at Harvard University from 1921 to 1957. He was later appointed dean of the Graduate School of Public Administration at Harvard, and also served as Nathaniel Ropes Professor. He was an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. In 1951, he was president of the American Economic Association. The John H. Williams Prize was established at Harvard in 1958.
Go to Profile#4625
Alexander Chayanov
1888 - 1937 (49 years)
Alexander Vasilyevich Chayanov was a Russian, then Soviet agrarian economist, scholar of rural sociology, and advocate of agrarianism and cooperatives. Personal life Chayanov was born in Moscow, the son of a merchant, Vasily Ivanovich Chayanov, and an agronomist, Elena Konstantinovna . He attended a Realschule and the Moscow Agricultural Institute , becoming an agronomist; he taught and published works on agriculture until 1914, when he began working for various government institutions. In 1912 he married Elena Vasilevna Grigorieva, a marriage that lasted until 1920. In 1921 he married Olga ...
Go to Profile#4626
Simon Patten
1852 - 1922 (70 years)
Simon Nelson Patten was an American economist and the chair of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Patten was one of the first economists to posit a shift from an 'economics of scarcity' to an 'economics of abundance'; that is, he believed that soon there would be enough wealth to satisfy people's basic needs and that the economy would shift from an emphasis on production to consumption.
Go to Profile#4627
Paul Marlor Sweezy
#4628
William Smart
1853 - 1915 (62 years)
William Smart was a Scottish economist. Initially inspired by Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, Smart was a conveyor of the thought of the Austrian School, before being won-over to the neoclassicalism of Alfred Marshall.
Go to Profile#4629
John D. Black
1883 - 1960 (77 years)
John Donald Black was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at University of Minnesota from 1918 to 1927, and then from 1927 to 1956 at Harvard University. Black was one of the authors of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. He was also president of the American Economic Association in 1955. Black died at a Boston hospital in 1960.
Go to Profile#4630
Arthur Spiethoff
1873 - 1957 (84 years)
Arthur Spiethoff was a German economist, born in Düsseldorf. He studied economics at the University of Berlin, and later taught in Prague and Bonn.
Go to Profile#4631
William Z. Ripley
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
William Zebina Ripley was an American economist, lecturer at Columbia University, professor of economics at MIT, professor of political economy at Harvard University, and racial anthropologist. Ripley was famous for his criticisms of American railroad economics and American business practices in the 1920s and 1930s, and later for his tripartite racial theory of Europe. His work of racial anthropology was later taken up by racial physical anthropologists, eugenicists, white supremacists, Nordicists, and racists in general, and it was considered a valid academic work at the time, although today...
Go to Profile#4632
Thomas Nixon Carver
1865 - 1961 (96 years)
Thomas Nixon Carver was an American economics professor. Early life He grew up on a farm, the son of Quaker parents. He received an undergraduate education at Iowa Wesleyan College and the University of Southern California. After studying under John Bates Clark and Richard T. Ely at Johns Hopkins University, he received a PhD degree at Cornell University under Walter Francis Willcox in 1894.
Go to Profile#4633
Jeremiah Jenks
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Jeremiah Whipple Jenks was an American economist, educator, and Professor at Cornell University, who held various posts in the US government throughout his career. He served as a member of the Dillingham Immigration Commission from 1907 to 1914 in which he led research projects on the state of immigration to the United States.
Go to Profile#4634
Constantin von Dietze
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Friedrich Carl Nicolaus Constantin von Dietze was an agronomist, lawyer, economist, and theologian. He was a member of both the Confessing Church and the "Freiburg Circle" during the Nazi era. Early life and World War I Friedrich Carl Nicolaus Constantin von Dietze was born in Gottesgnaden, the son of a former Rittmeister, Constantin von Dietze by his marriage to Johanna Gündell. His grandfather, Adolf von Dietze-Barby, was a close friend of Otto von Bismarck and a conservative member of the Prussian House of Representatives.
Go to Profile#4635
Katharine Coman
1857 - 1915 (58 years)
Katharine Ellis Coman was an American social activist and professor. She was based at the women-only Wellesley College, Massachusetts, where she created new courses in political economy, in line with her personal belief in social change. As dean, she established a new department of economics and sociology.
Go to Profile#4636
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#4637
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#4638
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.
Go to Profile#4639
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.
Go to Profile#4640
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#4641
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#4642
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#4643
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.
Go to Profile#4644
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#4645
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#4646
John Ulric Nef
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
John Ulric Nef, Jr. was an American economic historian, and the co-founder of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. He was associated with the University of Chicago for over half a century, and co-founded the Committee there in 1941.
Go to Profile#4647
A. E. Levett
1881 - 1932 (51 years)
Ada Elizabeth Levett , known professionally as A. E. Levett, was an Oxford-educated native of Bodiam, Sussex, who became a pioneering woman economic historian specialising in medieval feudalism. Levett was Vice Principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford, and later took up an appointment to a history chair at Westfield College at the University of London.
Go to Profile#4648
Siegfried von Ciriacy-Wantrup
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Siegfried von Ciriacy-Wantrup was a German academic. Born in Langenberg, Germany in 1906. After doing his master's work in Illinois, he returned to Bonn to get his Ph.D. in 1931. In 1936, he left Nazi Germany for the United States, arriving at UC Berkeley and the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics in 1938.
Go to Profile#4649
Alvin Saunders Johnson
1874 - 1971 (97 years)
Alvin Saunders Johnson was an American economist and a co-founder and first director of The New School. Biography Alvin Johnson was born near Homer, Nebraska. He was educated at the University of Nebraska and Columbia . Afterwards, he was employed in various positions at Columbia, the University of Nebraska, the University of Texas, the University of Chicago, Stanford, and at Cornell after 1913.
Go to Profile#4650
Gabriel Hauge
1914 - 1981 (67 years)
Gabriel Hauge was a prominent American bank executive and economist. Hauge served as assistant to the president for economic affairs during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Background Gabriel Hauge was born in Hawley, Minnesota. He was the son of Reverend Søren G. Hauge, a Lutheran minister and an immigrant from Sandane in Sogn og Fjordane, Norway. Hauge earned a B.A. from Concordia College in 1935, an M.A. from Harvard University in 1938, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1947.
Go to Profile