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.
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List of the most influential people in Economics,
#4701
Paul Cootner
1930 - 1978 (48 years)
Paul Harold Cootner was a financial economist noted for his book The Random Character of Stock Market Prices. Cootner was born in Logansport, Indiana. He attended the University of Florida, where he earned bachelor's and master's degree. He received a PhD in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953.
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William Henry Chaloner
1914 - 1987 (73 years)
William Henry Chaloner was an English social and economic historian who was Editor and Treasurer of the Chetham Society and Editor of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society. Life Chaloner was Professor of Economic History at the University of Manchester.
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David Dodd
1895 - 1988 (93 years)
David LeFevre Dodd was an American educator, financial analyst, author, economist, and investor. In his student years, Dodd was a and colleague of Benjamin Graham at Columbia Business School. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 almost wiped out Graham, who had started teaching the year before at his alma mater, Columbia. The crash inspired Graham to search for a more conservative, safer way to invest. Graham agreed to teach with the stipulation that someone take notes. Dodd, then a young instructor at Columbia, volunteered. Those transcriptions served as the basis for a 1934 book Security Analysis, which galvanized the concept of value investing.
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Lloyd Mints
1888 - 1989 (101 years)
Lloyd Wynn Mints was an American economist, notable for his contributions to the quantity theory of money. Biography Born in South Dakota, Lloyd Mints moved with his family in 1888 to Missouri and then in 1901 to Boulder, Colorado. He received from the University of Colorado his bachelor's degree in 1914 and master's degree in 1915. He was a secondary school teacher in Cripple Creek, Colorado from 1915 to 1917 and then moved to Washington, D.C. as an analyst in a federal office. In 1918 he was transferred to Chicago. In 1919 Mints enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he was assigned to teach undergraduate courses.
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Chester W. Wright
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Chester Whitney Wright was an American economic historian, and Professor at the University of Chicago, known for his works on the economic history of the United States. Biography Wright studied at the Harvard University, where he obtained his AB in 1901, his AM in 1902, and his PhD in 1906 with the thesis, entitled "Wool-growing and tariff: A Study in the Economic History of the United States" under Frank William Taussig.
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Michael Polanyi
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Michael Polanyi was a Hungarian-British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy. He argued that positivism is a false account of knowing.
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Thomas Sewall Adams
1873 - 1933 (60 years)
Thomas Sewall Adams was an American economist who was Professor of Political Economy at Yale University. He was advisor to the U.S. Treasury Department, and a key architect of the post-WWI fiscal state in the United States.
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Henry Carter Adams
1851 - 1921 (70 years)
Henry Carter Adams was a U.S. economist and Professor of Political Economy and finance at the University of Michigan. Early years Adams was born in Davenport, Iowa on December 31, 1851, son of Ephraim Adams and Elizabeth S.A. Douglass, and grandson of Ephraim Adams, of New Ipswich, New Hampshire. His father was a missionary of the "Iowa Band" from New England. He graduated from Iowa College in 1874, now called Grinnell College, which was co-founded by his father. Adams's middle name Carter acknowledged a benefactor of Grinnell College.
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Colin Clark
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Colin Grant Clark was a British and Australian economist and statistician who worked in both the United Kingdom and Australia. He pioneered the use of gross national product as the basis for studying national economies.
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Vladas Jurgutis
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Vladas Jurgutis was a Lithuanian priest, economist, and professor. As the first chairman of the Bank of Lithuania he is unofficially considered to be the "father of the Lithuanian litas." Biography In 1902 Jurgutis graduated from a high school in Palanga and enrolled in the Kaunas Priest Seminary. After graduation in 1906 he continued his studies at the Saint Petersburg Roman Catholic Theological Academy and received a Master's Degree in 1910. From 1910 to 1913 he studied economics at Munich University. In 1913 he served as a priest in Švėkšna and later in Liepāja. During World War I Jurgutis retreated to Russia, where he worked as a pastor in Saratov and Astrakhan.
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Allyn Abbott Young
1876 - 1929 (53 years)
Allyn Abbott Young was an American economist. He was born into a middle-class family in Kenton, Ohio. He died aged 52 in London, his life cut short by pneumonia during an influenza epidemic. He was then at the height of his intellectual powers and current president of Section F of the British Association. Uniquely, Young had also been president of the American Statistical Association and the American Economic Association .
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John Maynard Keynes
1883 - 1946 (63 years)
John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes was an English economist and philosopher whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments. Originally trained in mathematics, he built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles. One of the most influential economists of the 20th century, he produced writings that are the basis for the school of thought known as Keynesian economics, and its various offshoots. His ideas, reformulated as New Keynesianism, are fundamental to mainstream macroeconomics. He is known a...
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Ichiro Nakayama
1898 - 1981 (83 years)
Ichiro Nakayama was a Japanese economist. He graduated from The Tokyo University of Commerce in 1926, and then studied under Joseph Schumpeter in Germany. He was a pioneer of mathematical economics in Japan. After serving as assistant at The Tokyo University of Commerce, he became an assistant professor in 1933, a professor in 1937 and president in 1949 at the same institution. He became Chairman of Central Labor Relations Commission of Japan in 1950, and served as the first Chairman of The Tax Commission of Japan from 1959 to 1965. In 1965 he was appointed as a professor emeritus of Hitotsubashi University.
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Antonio Genovesi
1713 - 1769 (56 years)
Antonio Genovesi was an Italian writer on philosophy and political economy. Biography Son of Salvatore Genovese, a shoemaker, and Adriana Alfinito of San Mango, Antonio Genovesi was born in Castiglione, near Salerno in 1713. He began studying early on under the direction of his father and, at fourteen, under Niccolò Genovesi, a relative, and young doctor from Naples, who taught Antonio peripatetic philosophy for two years, and Cartesian philosophy for another year. When he was eighteen, during his theological studies, he fell in love with a girl from Castiglione, Angela Dragone. His father di...
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Leo Huberman
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Leo Huberman was an American socialist economist. In 1949 he founded and co-edited Monthly Review with Paul Sweezy. He was the chair of the Department of Social Science at New College, Columbia University; labor editor of the newspaper PM; and the author of the popular history books Man’s Worldly Goods and We, the People: The Drama of America.
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G. Warren Nutter
1923 - 1979 (56 years)
G. Warren Nutter was an American economist, who was known primarily for his work on political economy, industrial concentration, price theory, and Soviet economic history and for cofounding the "Virginia school of political economy."
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Kostiantyn Voblyi
1876 - 1947 (71 years)
Kostiantyn Hryhorovych Voblyi was a Ukrainian economic geographer, scientist economist, professor of the Kyiv University, academician of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences , Vice-president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences , director of the Institute of Economics . Honored Scientist of Ukraine , awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour.
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Morarji Desai
1896 - 1995 (99 years)
Morarji Ranchhodji Desai was an Indian independence activist and politician who served as the 4th Prime Minister of India between 1977 and 1979 leading the government formed by the Janata Party. During his long career in politics, he held many important posts in government such as Chief Minister of Bombay State, Home Minister, Finance Minister and 2nd Deputy Prime Minister of India.
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David Horowitz
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
David Horowitz was an Israeli economist and the first Governor of the Bank of Israel. Biography David Horowitz was born in Drohobych, in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine. He immigrated to Palestine in 1920 and was one of the first members of Hashomer Hatzair.
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Yehuda Grunfeld
1930 - 1960 (30 years)
Yehuda Grunfeld was an econometrician in the late 1950s. Personal life Grunfeld was born on March 11, 1930. On July 16, 1960, the 30-year-old drowned while rescuing his son from an undertow off the coast of Israel.
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Robert F. Hoxie
1868 - 1916 (48 years)
Robert Franklin Hoxie was an American economist, known for his work on labor history. Personal Hoxie was born in Edmeston, New York to Solomon and Lucy Hoxie. He married Lucy Bennett in 1898 and they had no children. Suffering from ill-health most of his life, it is believed that in a mood of deep depression he ended his own life at the age of 48.
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William Blake
1774 - 1852 (78 years)
William Blake was an English classical economist who contributed to the early theory of purchasing power parity. Life He was born in London on 31 January 1774, the son of William and Alicia Blake. He was educated at Charterhouse School, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1789. He graduated B.A. in 1793 as 7th wrangler, became a Fellow of the college in 1795, and graduated M.A. in 1796. Giving up his fellowship in 1797, he entered Lincoln's Inn, and was called to the bar in 1799.
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Harry A. Millis
1873 - 1948 (75 years)
Harry Alvin Millis was an American civil servant, economist, and educator and who was prominent in the first four decades of the 20th century. He was a prominent educator, and his writings on labor relations were described at his death by several prominent economists as "landmarks". Millis is best known for serving on the "first" National Labor Relations Board, an executive-branch agency which had no statutory authority. He was also the second chairman of the "second" National Labor Relations Board, where he initiated a number of procedural improvements and helped stabilize the Board's enfor...
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John H. Gray
1859 - 1946 (87 years)
John Henry Gray was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at Northwestern University, Carleton College, and the University of Minnesota. In 1914, he served as president of the American Economic Association.
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Bertram Wolfe
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Bertram David Wolfe was an American scholar, leading communist, and later a leading anti-communist. He authored many works related to communism, including biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera.
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William Stanley Jevons
#4727
David James Davies
1893 - 1956 (63 years)
David James Davies , known as D. J. Davies, was a Welsh economist, industrialist, essayist, author, political activist, pilot, and an internationalist. Davies was a world traveller before returning home to Wales.
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Edgar Salin
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
Edgar Bernhard Jacques Salin was a German economist, historian, and translator. Born on 10 February 1892 in Frankfurt, he studied political economy and jurisprudence, completing his PhD at Heidelberg University in 1913 with a thesis on the economic development of Alaska under the supervision of Alfred Weber. After habilitating at Heidelberg in 1920 with a monograph on the political thought of Plato, Salin taught there and at Kiel before taking up a position as Professor of National Economy at the University of Basel in 1927, which he held until 1962. He served as Chancellor of Basel University.
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Joseph Shield Nicholson
1850 - 1927 (77 years)
Joseph Shield Nicholson, FBA FRSE was an English economist. Life Nicholson was born in Wrawby in Lincolnshire on 9 November 1850 the only son of Mary Anne Grant and her husband Rev Thomas Nicholson, minister of Banbury. He was educated at Lewisham School in London.
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Gustav Cohn
1840 - 1919 (79 years)
Gustav Cohn was a German economist, noted for his pioneering contributions to the theory and policy of transportation and public finance. He was educated at Berlin and Jena universities. During 1867 and 1868 he was the holder of a fellowship at the Royal Statistical Bureau of Berlin, and in 1869 became privat-docent at the University of Heidelberg, but in the same year accepted an invitation from the Polytechnikum at Riga. Cohn paid a visit to England in 1873, and the fruits of his observation and research were embodied in the masterly production "Untersuchungen über die Englische Eisenbahnpolitik," 2 vols., Leipzig, 1874-75.
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Franklin Ho
1895 - 1975 (80 years)
Franklin Lien Ho was a Chinese economist influential in the Republic of China. He was the director of the Political Department of the Cabinet and later the Vice Minister of Economic Affairs. He was also director general of the Agricultural Credit Administration. He founded the economics department at Nankai University and later served as the university's acting president in 1947 and 1948. He then emigrated to the United States and joined the faculty of Columbia University, retiring in 1960. Ho was elected a member of Academia Sinica in 1962.
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Friedrich Lutz
1901 - 1975 (74 years)
Friedrich August Lutz was a German economist who developed the expectations hypothesis. Life In 1920, Lutz graduated from high school in Stuttgart. He studied economics at Heidelberg University and Humboldt University of Berlin, where he met economist Walter Eucken, and went on to graduate from the University of Tübingen in 1925.
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Henri Hauser
1866 - 1946 (80 years)
Henri Hauser was a French historian, geographer, and economist. A pioneer in the study of the economic history of the early modern period, he also wrote on contemporary economic issues and held the first chair in economic history to be established at a French university.
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Karl Přibram
1877 - 1973 (96 years)
Karl Eman Přibram , also known as "Karl Pribram", was an Austrian-born economist. He is most noted for his work in labor economics, in industrial organization, and in the history of economic thought.
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Benoy Kumar Sarkar
1887 - 1949 (62 years)
Benoy Kumar Sarkar was an Indian social scientist, professor, and nationalist. He founded several institutes in Calcutta, including the Bengali Institute of Sociology, Bengali Asia Academy, Bengali Dante Society, and Bengali Institute of American Culture.
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José Antonio Mayobre
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
José Antonio Mayobre was a Venezuelan economist who worked as an academic economist, a diplomat and international civil servant. He was a Minister of Finance of Venezuela and the Executive Secretary of the ECLAC.
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August Cieszkowski
1814 - 1894 (80 years)
Count August Dołęga Cieszkowski was a Polish philosopher, economist and social and political activist. His Hegelian philosophy influenced the young Karl Marx and action theorists. Biography Cieszkowski was born in Nowa Sucha, in the Duchy of Warsaw. He studied at the Jagiellonian University and in then, from 1832, at the University of Berlin where he became interested in Hegelianism through the lectures of Karl Ludwig Michelet, who became a lifelong friend. He gained his doctorate in philosophy from Heidelberg University in 1838. After his studies he travelled around Europe, visiting France, ...
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Toni Stolper
1890 - 1988 (98 years)
Antonie "Toni" Stolper was an Austrian-German economist and journalist. She fled Europe and immigrated to the United States in 1933 and moved to Canada in 1977. Biography Stolper was born Antonie Kassowitz, daughter of and , in Vienna, Austria in 1890. She studied law in Vienna and economics in Berlin, Germany, earning her doctorate under Heinrich Herkner in 1917. In 1921, she married Gustav Stolper, the editor of a journal called Der Österreichische Volkswirt . In 1925, the couple moved to Berlin, where Gustav Stolper established a new paper, Der Deutsche Volkswirt . Toni Stolper wrote regu...
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Robert M. Haig
1887 - 1953 (66 years)
Robert Murray Haig was an American economist regarded as an expert in public finance and taxation. The concept of Haig–Simons income bears his name. Haig graduated with a PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1914, with a thesis written under supervision of Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman.
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Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus
1880 - 1960 (80 years)
Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus or N.W. Posthumus was a Dutch economic historian, political scientist, and professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Posthumus was one of the founders of both the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam.
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Edwin Francis Gay
1867 - 1946 (79 years)
Edwin Francis Gay was an American economist, Professor of Economic History and first Dean of the Harvard Business School. Biography Born in Detroit, as the son of a rich businessman, Gay attended schools in the United States and in Switzerland. In 1890, he obtained his A.B. in history and philosophy at the University of Michigan. He returned to Europe to study agriculture, industry, trade and history at universities in Leipzig, Göttingen. Zurich, Berlin and London. In 1892, he married his Michigan classmate Louise Randolph, with whom he shared his research. In 1902, he received his PhD from t...
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Elisha Andrews
1844 - 1917 (73 years)
Elisha Benjamin Andrews was an American economist, soldier, and educator. Early life Andrews was born in Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Career He served in Connecticut regiments during the Civil War as a private and later promoted through ranks to 2nd lieutenant. He was wounded on August 24, 1865, at Petersburg.
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Friedrich Kleinwächter
1838 - 1927 (89 years)
Friedrich Kleinwächter was an Austrian economist. Social life Friedrich Kleinwächter was born in the multiethnic Prag of the times of the imperial Austria-Hungary. His family was German, living next to Czechs, Jews and others. Kleinwächter worked and died in Czernowitz/Bukovina, which was even more multiethnic and became Romanian since 1919. In 1909, Kleinwächter had been ennobled and was authorized to use the prefix "von" before "Kleinwächter".
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Steven L. Heston
1900 - Present (126 years)
Steven "Steve" L. Heston is an American mathematician, economist, and financier. He's also prominently active in the field of gambling-related research, where he sometimes uses the pen name Kim Lee. Education Steve Heston studied Mathematics and Economics at the University of Maryland, wherefrom he obtained his B.S. In 1985, he completed his M.B.A. studies in Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration. From the same university, Carnegie Mellon, in 1987, he received his M.S. in Finance and in 1990 his Ph.D.
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Francesco Vito
1902 - 1968 (66 years)
Francesco Maria Gerard Vito was an Italian economist and university rector. Biography In 1925, he graduated in law from the University of Naples, in 1926 in Economics, and Social and Political Philosophy in 1928. Between 1929 and 1934, completed his studies at schools and universities of Monaco of Bavaria, Berlin, London, New York and Chicago. In 1935, he obtained the chair of Economics at the Faculty of Political Science of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan and held it until his death. In 1959, after the death of Father Agostino Gemelli he became Rector of the Catholic Univer...
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Jean-Baptiste Say
1767 - 1832 (65 years)
Jean-Baptiste Say was a liberal French economist and businessman who argued in favor of competition, free trade and lifting restraints on business. He is best known for Say's law—also known as the law of markets—which he popularized. Scholars disagree on the surprisingly subtle question of whether it was Say who first stated what is now called Say's law. Moreover, he was one of the first economists to study entrepreneurship and conceptualized entrepreneurs as organizers and leaders of the economy. He was also closely involved in the development of the École spéciale de commerce et d'industrie...
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Raymond de Roover
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Raymond Adrien Marie de Roover was an economic historian of medieval Europe, whose scholarship explained why Scholastic economic thought is best understood as a precursor of, and wholly compatible with, classical economic thought. In contrast, many mid-20th-century economic historians, such as R.H. Tawney, taught that Karl Marx was the last and greatest of the Scholastic economists.
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Oskar Anderson
1887 - 1960 (73 years)
Oskar Johann Viktor Anderson was a Russian-German mathematician of Baltic German descent. He is best known for his work on mathematical statistics and econometrics. Life Anderson was born from a Baltic German family in Minsk , but soon moved to Kazan . His father, Nikolai Anderson, was professor in Finno-Ugric languages at the University of Kazan. His older brothers were the folklorist Walter Anderson and the astrophysicist Wilhelm Anderson.
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Yrjö Jahnsson
1877 - 1936 (59 years)
Yrjö Jahnsson was a Finnish economics professor at the University of Helsinki, appointed in 1911. He openly criticized the strict monetary policy of the "orthodox" government and central bank in the early 1930s, and was ideologically aligned with the Fennoman movement. Jahnsson achieved business success and amassed a significant fortune during the 1920s and 1930s. His wife, Hilma Jahnsson , used the wealth to establish the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation.
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Théodore Limperg
1879 - 1961 (82 years)
Théodore Limperg jr. was a Dutch accountant, and Professor in Business economics at the University of Amsterdam. He is particularly known for his contribution to the international debate about replacement costs in the 1920s.
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