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,
#4751
Fred M. Taylor
1855 - 1932 (77 years)
Fred Manville Taylor was a U.S. economist and educator best known for his contribution to the theory of market socialism. He taught mostly history at Albion College from 1879 to 1892. He taught in the department of economics at University of Michigan from 1892 to 1929 after receiving his Ph.D. in political philosophy there in 1888. His Principles of Economics went through 9 editions. Of a libertarian ideology, he was noted as a clear and rigorous expositor of economic theory in the partial-equilibrium lineage of Alfred Marshall.
Go to Profile#4752
John Maurice Clark
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
John Maurice Clark was an American economist whose work combined the rigor of traditional economic analysis with an "institutionalist" attitude. Clark was a pioneer in developing the notion of workable competition and the theoretical basis of modern Keynesian economics, including the concept of the economic multiplier.
Go to Profile#4753
Ferdinand Tönnies
1855 - 1936 (81 years)
Ferdinand Tönnies was a German sociologist, economist, and philosopher. He was a significant contributor to sociological theory and field studies, best known for distinguishing between two types of social groups, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft . He co-founded the German Society for Sociology together with Max Weber and Georg Simmel and many other founders. He was president of the society from 1909 to 1933, after which he was ousted for having criticized the Nazis. Tönnies was regarded as the first proper German sociologist and published over 900 works, contributing to many areas of sociology and philosophy.
Go to Profile#4754
Ragnar Nurkse
1907 - 1959 (52 years)
Ragnar Wilhelm Nurkse was an Estonian-American economist and policy maker mainly in the fields of international finance and economic development. He is considered the pioneer of Balanced Growth Theory.
Go to Profile#4755
Evsei Liberman
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Evsei Grigorievich Liberman was a Soviet economist who lived in Kharkov, Ukrainian SSR. He is noted as the architect of the Soviet economic reform of 1965, also known as "Libermanism". Biography Liberman was born in Slavuta, Russian Empire, in a wealthy Jewish family. He was a graduate of Kiev University, Faculty of Law in 1920 and Kharkiv Institute of Engineering and Economics, Machine-Building Faculty in 1933. During 1920s he worked as a researcher at the Kharkiv Institute of Labor. He taught at the Kharkiv Institute of National Economy in 1920s, Kharkiv Engineering and Economic Institute in 1930s-1950-s, the Kharkiv V.I.
Go to Profile#4756
Harry Dexter White
1892 - 1948 (56 years)
Harry Dexter White was a senior U.S. Treasury department official. Working closely with the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., he helped set American financial policy toward the Allies of World War II. He was later accused of espionage by passing information to the Soviet Union.
Go to Profile#4757
Emily Greene Balch
1867 - 1961 (94 years)
Emily Greene Balch was an American economist, sociologist and pacifist. Balch combined an academic career at Wellesley College with a long-standing interest in social issues such as poverty, child labor, and immigration, as well as settlement work to uplift poor immigrants and reduce juvenile delinquency.
Go to Profile#4758
Martín de Azpilcueta
1492 - 1586 (94 years)
Martín de Azpilcueta , or Doctor Navarrus, was an important Spanish canonist and theologian in his time, and an early economist who independently formulated the quantity theory of money in 1556. Life He was born in Barásoain, Navarre, and was a relative of Francis Xavier. He obtained a degree in theology at Alcalá, then in 1518 he obtained a degree of doctor in canon law from Toulouse in France. Beginning in 1524, Azpilcueta served in several canon law chairs at the University of Salamanca. From 1538 to 1556, he taught at Coimbra University in Portugal, at the invitation of the kings of Portu...
Go to Profile#4759
Benjamin Anderson
1886 - 1949 (63 years)
Benjamin McAlester Anderson Jr. was an American economist of the Austrian School. Early life and education Benjamin Anderson was born in Columbia, Missouri on May 1, 1886, to Benjamin McLean Anderson, a businessman and politician, and Mary Frances Anderson . When he was sixteen years old, Anderson enrolled in classes at the University of Missouri in his hometown and earned his A.B. in 1906. After receiving his bachelor's degree, Anderson accepted an appointment as professor of political economy and sociology at Missouri Valley College, where he remained for a year before becoming head of the ...
Go to Profile#4760
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.
Go to Profile#4761
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.
Go to Profile#4762
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.
Go to Profile#4763
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.
Go to Profile#4764
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.
Go to Profile#4765
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 .
Go to Profile#4766
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...
Go to Profile#4767
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.
Go to Profile#4768
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...
Go to Profile#4769
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.
Go to Profile#4770
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#4771
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#4772
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#4773
Pietro Verri
1728 - 1797 (69 years)
Count Pietro Verri was an Italian economist, historian, philosopher and writer. Among the most important personalities of the 18th-century Italian culture, he is considered among the fathers of the Lombard reformist Enlightenment and the most important pre-Smithian authority on cheapness and plenty.
Go to Profile#4774
Ōuchi Hyōei
1888 - 1980 (92 years)
was a Japanese economist. Early life and education Ōuchi was born on August 29, 1888, in what is now Minaminawaji, Hyogo, Japan. After graduating from schools in Hyogo and Kumamoto, and earned a degree from Tokyo Imperial University.
Go to Profile#4775
Richard Whately
1787 - 1863 (76 years)
Richard Whately was an English academic, rhetorician, logician, philosopher, economist, and theologian who also served as a reforming Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. He was a leading Broad Churchman, a prolific and combative author over a wide range of topics, a flamboyant character, and one of the first reviewers to recognise the talents of Jane Austen.
Go to Profile#4776
Karl Rathgen
1856 - 1921 (65 years)
Karl Rathgen was a German economist. He was the first Chancellor of the University of Hamburg. After studying in Strasbourg, Halle, Leipzig and Berlin, he passed the first state examination in Naumburg in 1880 in Naumburg and earned his doctorate in 1882 with a thesis on the Making of markets in Germany from the University of Straßburg.
Go to Profile#4777
Erik Lundberg
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Erik Filip Lundberg was a Swedish economist, born in Stockholm. He was a professor of political economics at Stockholm University and a member of the Stockholm School of economic thought. He was president of the International Economic Association from 1968 to 1971. From 1969 to 1979, he was a member of the committee that selects the laureates for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, the Economics Prize Committee, and served as the committee's chairman from 1975 to 1979.
Go to Profile#4778
David Kinley
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
David Kinley was a Scotland-born economist who worked in the United States. He was head of the department of economics of the University of Illinois and later president of the University. As an economist, he was of the classical school, and his main interest was in money and banking. Administration gradually took up most of his time as his career progressed.
Go to Profile#4779
Tokuzō Fukuda
1874 - 1930 (56 years)
Tokuzō Fukuda was a pioneer of modern Japanese economics. Fukuda introduced economic theory and economic history for the Social Policy School and the Younger Historical school of economics. He graduated from the Tokyo Higher School of Commerce . After he was appointed lecturer of his alma mater, he studied in Germany, under Karl Bücher among others in the field, and he earned his doctorate from Munich University. His thesis dealt with the social and economic development in Japan and was supervised by Lujo Brentano.
Go to Profile#4780
Taras Borodajkewycz
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Taras Borodajkewycz was a former member of the Nazi Party and, after World War II, professor of economic history at the College of World Trade in Vienna . He remained an unrepentant supporter of Nazism after the war and the pro-fascist views he allegedly expressed in his university lectures in the 1960s sparked major student demonstrations in Vienna that resulted in at least one fatality.
Go to Profile#4781
Paul Haensel
1878 - 1949 (71 years)
Paul Haensel was Russian and American financier, economist and scholar. Early life Paul Haensel was born in Moscow in 1878 in the family of merchant. In 1902 he graduated Moscow Practical Commercial Academy. He became a professor of Moscow University in financial law department and in 1918-1920 he worked as a dean of the law school.
Go to Profile#4782
Edith Abbott
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Edith Abbott was an American economist, statistician, social worker, educator, and author. Abbott was born in Grand Island, Nebraska. Abbott was a pioneer in the profession of social work with an educational background in economics. She was a leading activist in social reform with the ideals that humanitarianism needed to be embedded in education. Abbott was also in charge of implementing social work studies to the graduate level. Though she was met with resistance on her work with social reform at the University of Chicago, she ultimately was successful and was elected as the school's dean in 1924, making her one of the first female deans in the United States.
Go to Profile#4783
William Jasper Spillman
1863 - 1931 (68 years)
William Jasper Spillman is considered to be the founding father of agricultural economics. In addition, he is notable for being the only American to independently rediscover Mendel's laws of genetics.
Go to Profile#4784
Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Roscher
1817 - 1894 (77 years)
Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Roscher was a German economist from Hanover. Biography Roscher studied at Göttingen, where he became a member of Corps Hannovera, and Berlin, and obtained a professorship at Göttingen in 1844 and subsequently at Leipzig in 1848.
Go to Profile#4785
Michael James Farrell
1926 - 1975 (49 years)
Michael James Farrell , was a Cambridge economist professionally known as M. J. Farrell. Academically he is remembered largely for the celebrated parametric measure of productive efficiency that he published in 1957.
Go to Profile#4786
F. A. Harper
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Floyd Arthur "Baldy" Harper was an American academic, economist and writer who was best known for founding the Institute for Humane Studies in 1961. Personal life Baldy Harper was born and raised in Middleville, Michigan and graduated from Michigan State University. He went on to obtain a doctorate in agricultural economics from Cornell University. Economist Herbert J. Davenport was influential to Harper during his time at Cornell.
Go to Profile#4787
Bruce Alan Mccarl
#4788
Giuseppe Ugo Papi
1893 - 1989 (96 years)
Giuseppe Ugo Papi was an Italian economist. Papi was among the contributors of the Fascist finance magazine Lo Stato from 1930. He was the rector of the University "La Sapienza" of Rome from November 1953 to May 1966. He was also a Knight of the Civil Order of Savoy and a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
Go to Profile#4789
Bernhard Harms
1876 - 1939 (63 years)
Christoph Bernhard Cornelius Harms was a German economist and one of the first professors to undertake research in the field of international economics. He founded the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Germany's leading economic research institute, in 1914. Harms was Chair of Economics at the University of Kiel and head of the Institute until he was dismissed from office in 1933 by Nazi Party officials.
Go to Profile#4790
Samson Olajuwon Kokumo Olayide
1928 - 1984 (56 years)
Samson Olajuwon Kokumo Olayide , was an academic and professor of agricultural economics. Olayide was born to Josiah Ogunpoopo Olayide and Mariam Olayide . He married Theresa Folashade Olayide in 1961. And gave birth to four children [Biodun, Tokunbo, Oluwole, and Olajide]
Go to Profile#4791
Mykhailo Volobuiev
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Mykhailo Symonovych Volobuiev was a Ukrainian economist of Russian origin of the 1930s. He was a researcher at the Research Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kharkiv and a major contributing thinker and advocate for the economic self-sufficiency of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Go to Profile#4792
Theodore Gregory
1890 - 1970 (80 years)
Sir Theodore Emmanuel Gugenheim Gregory was a British economist. Biography Theodore Gregory was born in London on 10 September 1890. Gregory was educated at Dame Alice Owen's School in Islington. He attended the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gregory was an Assistant and Lecturer at the LSE between 1913 and 1919. Gregory was Cassel Reader in International Trade at the LSE in 1920. Gregory was Sir E. Cassel Professor of Economics in the University of London between 1927 and 1937. He was Dean of the Faculty of Economics at London University between 1927 and 1930. Gregory was a Senator of London University between 1928 and 1930.
Go to Profile#4793
Wilhelm Abel
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Wilhelm Abel was a German economist. He is particularly noted for his contributions to agricultural economics and economic history. Abel's first and most well known book was Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur published originally in 1935. It details the agrarian history of Europe from the 13th to the 20th centuries, focusing on periods of expansion and contraction corresponding to population. Other notable works include Die Wüstungen des ausgehenden Mittelalters, a study of medieval abandoned villages, Geschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft, a history of German rural life and economy, and Mass...
Go to Profile#4794
Adam Heydel
1893 - 1941 (48 years)
Adam Zdzisław Heydel was a Polish economist and representative of the Cracow School of Economics, a type of economic liberalism. Biography Early life and education Adam Heydel was the son of Zdzisław and Maria Heydel, his brother named Wojciech. He was a student at John III Sobieski High School and later studied in Moscow and Kyiv. In 1922 he studied law at the Jagiellonian University, where he got his doctorate. In the years 1921–1922 he worked in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1925 he got a habilitation in the field of political economy. Two years later he became a lecturer of economi...
Go to Profile#4795
David Davidson
1854 - 1942 (88 years)
David Davidson was a Swedish economist. He was professor of economics and taxation law at Uppsala University from 1890 to 1919. He founded and edited the journal Ekonomisk Tidskrift . Via the journal, Davidson has been credited with switching Swedish economic analysis from one that followed the German Historicist approach to one in which Anglo-American style economic theory played a more dominant role.
Go to Profile#4796
Albert Gallatin
1761 - 1849 (88 years)
Abraham Alfonse Albert Gallatin was a Genevan–American politician, diplomat, ethnologist and linguist. Often described as "America's Swiss Founding Father", he was a leading figure in the early years of the United States, helping shape the new republic's financial system and foreign policy. Gallatin was a prominent member of the Democratic-Republican Party, represented Pennsylvania in both chambers of Congress, and held several influential roles across four presidencies, most notably as the longest serving U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. He is also known for his contributions to academia, nam...
Go to Profile#4797
Eugen Schmalenbach
1873 - 1955 (82 years)
Eugen Schmalenbach was a German academic and economist. He was born in Halver, and attended the Leipzig College of Commerce starting in 1898. That college later became part of Leipzig University, only to emerge again as the Handelshochschule Leipzig.
Go to Profile#4798
Robert Lee Hale
1884 - 1969 (85 years)
Robert Lee Hale was an American lawyer and economist. He earned an economics degree at Harvard University, and then worked at Columbia Law School. He is known as a legal realist, and his work focused particularly on the distributive impact of legal rules.
Go to Profile#4799
Harald Ludvig Westergaard
1853 - 1936 (83 years)
Harald Ludvig Westergaard was a Danish statistician and economist known for his work in demography and the history of statistics. Harald Westergaard was born in Copenhagen and apart from a period studying in England and Germany in 1877-78 he lived there all his life. His subject at the University of Copenhagen was mathematics but he became interested in economics and, while he was in England, he seems to have met William Stanley Jevons. In the preface to the second edition of the Theory of Political Economy Jevons refers to Westergaard's mathematical suggestions. However, after this spectac...
Go to Profile#4800
E. Wight Bakke
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
Edward Wight Bakke was an American sociology and economics professor at Yale University who achieved prominence in the field of industrial relations. He was a Sterling Professor, Yale's highest level of academic rank, and served as director of the Yale Labor and Management Center from its founding in 1945 until its dissolution in the late 1950s. The author, co-author, or co-editor of thirteen books, Bakke made major contributions to the study of unemployment and organizational theory.
Go to Profile