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,
#4801
Georg Obrecht
1547 - 1612 (65 years)
Georg Obrecht was a German law professor and prominent developer of Cameralist thought. Biography Obrecht was born in 1547. He studied law at a variety of universities, including Tübingen, Heidelberg, Besançon, Dôle, and Orléans. After escaping death as a Protestant amidst the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, he returned to Strasbourg and eventually obtained a professorship at his own high school.
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Robert Hale Merriman
1908 - 1938 (30 years)
Robert Hale Merriman was an American doctoral student who fought with the Republican forces in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. He was killed while commanding the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades.
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Charles Rist
1874 - 1955 (81 years)
Charles Rist was a French economist. He was elected an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1932 and an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1938. His son is Léonard Rist.
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Harold Thayer Davis
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
Harold Thayer Davis was a mathematician, statistician, and econometrician, known for the Davis distribution. Davis received in 1915 his A.B. from Colorado College, in 1919 his A.M. from Harvard University, and in 1926 his PhD under Edward Burr Van Vleck from the University of Wisconsin, after working there as a mathematics instructor from 1920 to 1923. From 1923 to 1937 he taught mathematics at the Indiana University Bloomington, becoming a professor there. From February to August 1937 he was acting research director of the Cowles Commission. Davis became a professor in 1937 at Northwestern University in the mathematics department and the chair of the department in 1942.
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Henry B. Gardner
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
Henry Brayton Gardner was an American economist. He was a faculty member at Brown University from 1890 until 1928, serving as the first Eastman Professor of Political Economy from 1919 to 1928. In 1919, he served as president of the American Economic Association.
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Edmund J. James
1855 - 1925 (70 years)
Edmund Janes James was an American academic, president of the University of Illinois from 1904 to 1920, and the primary founder, first president and first editor for the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He also served as the 7th president of Northwestern University from 1902 to 1904.
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Vasily Sergeevich Nemchinov
1894 - 1964 (70 years)
#4808
William Fellner
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
William John Fellner was a Hungarian-American economist and Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University from 1952 until his retirement in 1973. Born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, he studied at the University of Budapest, the ETH Zurich and the Frederick William University in Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 1929, . Fellner served on the Council of Economic Advisers from 1973 to 1975.
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Alexander Ivanovich Chuprov
1842 - 1908 (66 years)
Alexander Ivanovich Chuprov was a professor of political economy and statistics at Moscow University whose lectures provided the standard introduction to economics for late 19th-century Russian students.
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Sidney Webb, 1st Baron Passfield
1859 - 1947 (88 years)
Sidney James Webb, 1st Baron Passfield, was a British socialist, economist and reformer, who co-founded the London School of Economics. He was an early member of the Fabian Society in 1884, joining, like George Bernard Shaw, three months after its inception. Along with his wife Beatrice Webb and with Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Edward R. Pease, Hubert Bland and Sydney Olivier, Shaw and Webb turned the Fabian Society into the pre-eminent politico-intellectual society in Edwardian England. He wrote the original, pro-nationalisation Clause IV for the British Labour Party.
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Konstantin Ostrovityanov
1892 - 1969 (77 years)
Konstantin Vasilyevich Ostrovityanov was a Soviet Marxist economist, academic and public figure. Biography He was born into the family of a village priest. In 1912 he graduated from the Tambov Theological Seminary. In the same year he entered the Kiev Commercial Institute and a year later he transferred to the Moscow Commercial Institute, from which he graduated in 1917. From 1914, Ostrovityanov was a member of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP.
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William Lyon Mackenzie King
1874 - 1950 (76 years)
William Lyon Mackenzie King was a Canadian statesman and politician who was the tenth prime minister of Canada for three non-consecutive terms from 1921 to 1926, 1926 to 1930, and 1935 to 1948. A Liberal, he was the dominant politician in Canada from the early 1920s to the late 1940s. King is best known for his leadership of Canada throughout the Great Depression and the Second World War. He played a major role in laying the foundations of the Canadian welfare state and established Canada's international reputation as a middle power fully committed to world order. With a total of 21 years an...
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Karl Heinrich Rau
1792 - 1870 (78 years)
Karl Heinrich Rau was a German political economist. Life Early career Rau was born at Erlangen, Bavaria. He studied from 1808 to 1812 at the University of Erlangen, where he afterwards remained as a Privatdozent. In 1814 he obtained the prize offered by the academy of Göttingen for the best treatment of the question how the disadvantages arising from the abolition of trade guilds might be removed. His memoir, greatly enlarged, was published in 1816 under the title Über das Zunftwesen und die Folgen seiner Aufhebung. In the same year appeared his Primae lineae historiae politices.
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William F. Willoughby
1867 - 1960 (93 years)
William Franklin Willoughby was an author of public administration texts including works on budgeting. He often worked with his twin brother, Westel W. Willoughby. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University, 1885
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Ignaz Jastrow
1856 - 1937 (81 years)
Ignaz Jastrow was a German economist and historian. Biography He was educated at the universities of Breslau, Berlin, and Göttingen. He became a university docent at Berlin in 1885 and was Leopold von Ranke's assistant in historical work. In 1904 he pursued industrial investigations in the United States, and in 1905 became professor of Administrative Science at Berlin. One daughter, Elisabeth Jastrow, was a classical archaeologist; the other Beate Jastrow Hahn, was an accomplished horticulturalist and author of 5 books. His granddaughter, Cornelia Oberlander was a highly respected landscape ...
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Allan George Barnard Fisher
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Allan George Barnard Fisher was a New Zealand-born economist. Perhaps his most notable contribution was to investigate economic development in terms of the sequential dominance of different sectors of the economy: the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors .
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Luigi Cossa
1831 - 1896 (65 years)
Luigi Cossa , Italian economist, was born in Milan. Life Educated at the universities of Pavia, Vienna and Leipzig, he was appointed professor of political economy at Pavia in 1858. Apart from this Cossa was the author of several other works which established him a high reputation.
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Frederik Zeuthen
1888 - 1959 (71 years)
Frederik Ludvig Bang Zeuthen was a Danish economist. He became an internationally recognized economist in the 1930s and published his research in English, French and German, as well as Danish. He was especially known for his theoretical microeconomics work in general equilibrium theory and the theories of market influences and pricing. He was one of the pioneers of the mathematical theory of monopolistic competition. At the same time, he was interested in social policy and distribution of income.
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Stafford Cripps
1889 - 1952 (63 years)
Sir Richard Stafford Cripps was a British Labour Party politician, barrister, and diplomat. A wealthy lawyer by background, he first entered Parliament at a by-election in 1931, and was one of a handful of Labour frontbenchers to retain his seat at the general election that autumn. He became a leading spokesman for the left-wing and co-operation in a Popular Front with Communists before 1939, in which year he was expelled from the Labour Party.
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Hieronim Stroynowski
1752 - 1815 (63 years)
Hieronim Stroynowski was a Polish bishop and economist. He was the rector of Vilnius University from 1799 to 1806 and the Bishop of Vilnius from 1814 until his death in 1815. His writings on economics contributed to Polish liberalism.
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Hazel Kyrk
1886 - 1957 (71 years)
Hazel Kyrk was an American economist and pioneer of consumer economics. Early life and education Hazel Kyrk was born in 1886 in Ashley, Ohio and was the only child of Elmer Kyrk, a drayman, and Jane Kyrk, a homemaker.
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İdris Küçükömer
1925 - 1987 (62 years)
İdris Küçükömer was a Turkish academic, philosopher and economist whose views has been influential in Turkish politics. He developed an alternative interpretation of Kemalism from the mid-1960s to his death.
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Dag Hammarskjöld
1905 - 1961 (56 years)
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld was a Swedish economist and diplomat who served as the second Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. As of 2023, he remains the youngest person to have held the post, having been only 47 years old when he was appointed. He was a son of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, who served as Prime Minister of Sweden from 1914 to 1917.
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Johann Beckmann
1739 - 1811 (72 years)
Johann Beckmann was a German scientific author and coiner of the word technology, to mean the science of trades. He was the first man to teach technology and write about it as an academic subject. Life He was born on 4 June 1739 at Hoya in Hanover, where his father was postmaster and receiver of taxes. He was educated at Stade and the university of Göttingen, where he studied theology, mathematics, physics, natural history, and public finance and administration. After completing his studies, in 1762 he made a study tour through Brunswick and the Dutch Republic examining mines, factories, natu...
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Leo Harmaja
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Leo Harmaja was a Finnish economist and statistician and professor of economics. Leo Harmaja graduated from the Mikkeli Lyceum in 1898 and then studied at the University of Helsinki, graduating with a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1903 and a licentiate in philosophy and a doctorate in philosophy in 1907. Harmaja's dissertation was on the implementation of the Gothenburg system in Finland.
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Wilhelm Lexis
1837 - 1914 (77 years)
Wilhelm Lexis , full name Wilhelm Hector Richard Albrecht Lexis, was a German statistician, economist, and social scientist. The Oxford Dictionary of Statistics cites him as a "pioneer of the analysis of demographic time series". Lexis is largely remembered for two items that bear his name—the Lexis ratio and the Lexis diagram.
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Matthew B. Hammond
1868 - 1933 (65 years)
Matthew Brown Hammond was an American economist. He was a professor of economics and sociology at Ohio State University since 1904. Hammond earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan in 1891, and PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1898.
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Carl C. Plehn
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Carl Copping Plehn was an American economist. He was a professor of public finance at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1893 to 1937. In 1923, he served as the 25th president of the American Economic Association.
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Alfred Amonn
1883 - 1962 (79 years)
Alfred Amonn was an Austrian economist . He studied law and economics at the universities of Innsbruck and Vienna, being named an associate professor at the University of Freiburg in 1910. He taught as a professor at Czernowitz University , German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague , Tokyo University , University of Berne .
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Jacob Hollander
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Jacob Harry Hollander was an American economist. Biography Hollander was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a BA in 1891, and a PhD in 1894. He became associate professor of finance there. In 1900, he became assistant professor of political economy, becoming full professor in 1904. He was appointed secretary to the Bimetallic Commission of 1897. US President McKinley named him Treasurer of the island of Puerto Rico in 1900. He resigned in 1901 after introducing a tax system. He was special commissioner to investigate financial conditions in San Domingo and until 1908 was financial advisor of the Dominican Republic.
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Edwin R. A. Seligman
1861 - 1939 (78 years)
Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman , was an American economist who spent his entire academic career at Columbia University in New York City. Seligman is best remembered for his pioneering work involving taxation and public finance. His principles for a progressive federal income tax were adopted by Congress after the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment. A prolific scholar and teacher, his students had great influence on the fiscal architecture of postcolonial nations. He served as an influential founding member of the American Economics Association.
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Beth Hayes
1955 - 1984 (29 years)
Beth Hayes was an American economist specializing in theoretical microeconomics. She has been memorialized by an award established by the University of Pennsylvania. Educational background Hayes graduated from the honors program at the University of Michigan in 1977 and received her Ph.D. in Economics in 1982 from the University of Pennsylvania, studying under David Cass. Her dissertation, Three Essays in Microeconomic Theory, formed the basis for her foundational work in research on two-part tariffs and asymmetrical information, and insurance contracts.
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Ernest L. Bogart
1870 - 1958 (88 years)
Ernest Ludlow Bogart was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign from 1909 to 1938. In 1931, he served as president of the American Economic Association.
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Moisés Bensabat Amzalak
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Moisés Bensabat Amzalak was a Portuguese scholar and economist. Amzalak was born and educated in Lisbon. He combined a successful business career with broad academic activity. A devoted Jew, a central figure in the Portuguese Jewish Community, he headed the Lisbon Jewish community from 1926 until his death in 1978.
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Henry Rogers Seager
1870 - 1930 (60 years)
Henry Rogers Seager was an American economist, and Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University, who served as president of the American Association for Labor Legislation. Inspired by the work of the Austrian School, Seager published his main work "Principles of Economics" in 1913. Inline with the institutional economics this textbook was typical "empirical and institutional in applied work, that dealt with real markets." In 1929 he published his most cited work, entitled "Trust and corporation problems."
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Ingvar Wedervang
1891 - 1961 (70 years)
Ingvar Brynhjulf Wedervang was a Norwegian economist and statistician. He graduated from the University of Oslo with a degree in economics in 1913. During the next nine years, he worked first as a government statistician with Statistics Norway, then for the private company Treschow-Fritzøe, and again for a government agency. In 1922 he moved to Munich and continued his studies. He returned to Statistics Norway in 1923 and received his doctorate in 1925 with a dissertation on the sex proportion at birth and infant mortality. Wedervang became lecturer at the University of Oslo in 1925 and was a...
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Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob
1759 - 1827 (68 years)
Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob was a German philosopher, political scientist and economist. During the French occupation of Germany, he worked as a consultant and professor in Russia. Biography He was born at Wettin, Duchy of Magdeburg; in 1777 he entered the University of Halle. In 1780 he was appointed teacher at the gymnasium, and in 1791 professor of philosophy at the university. He was very popular as a lecturer on metaphysics, but after 1800 turned his attention especially to political economy.
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Henry Parker Willis
1874 - 1937 (63 years)
Henry Parker Willis was an American financial expert. Biography He was born at Weymouth, Massachusetts, the son of the Universalist minister and suffragist Olympia Brown. He graduated from the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in 1897 and was a member of Alpha Kappa Psi professional business fraternity.
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Willem Somermeyer
1919 - 1982 (63 years)
Willem Hendrik Somermeyer was a Dutch economist, Professor in Econometrics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, particularly known for his consumption-savings model.
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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
#4850
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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