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,
#4851
David McCord Wright
1909 - 1968 (59 years)
David McCord Wright was an American economist and educator at the University of Georgia. He was a graduate of Harvard University. Personal Wright was born in Savannah, Georgia. He married Caroline Noble Jones and had three children: Anna, Antony and Peter.
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Balthasar H. Meyer
1866 - 1954 (88 years)
Balthasar Henry Meyer was an American government official and professor of economics and sociology. He served for 28 years as a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Early life Meyer was born near Mequon, Wisconsin, the son of Henry and Louise Meyer. He attended Oshkosh State Normal School, receiving his bachelor's degree, and then took two degrees, including his doctorate in 1897, from the University of Wisconsin, after doing graduate work at the University of Berlin in 1894–95.
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Karl Marlo
1810 - 1865 (55 years)
Karl Marlo, pseudonym of Karl Georg Winkelblech , was a German professor, scientist, chemist and state socialist. Life Marlo was born in Ensheim near Mainz. After finishing his studies in natural sciences and chemistry in Giessen, he became a private tutor in Marburg and, from 1839, a Professor of Chemistry at the Higher Trade School at Kassel, Hesse.
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Frederick Albert Cleveland
1865 - 1946 (81 years)
Frederick Albert Cleveland was a United States economist. Biography He graduated from DePauw University in 1890. He studied for the bar, but gave up practice in 1896 and thereafter gave his entire attention to economics, pursuing special studies in economics first at the University of Chicago and then at the University of Pennsylvania .
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F. W. Taussig
1859 - 1940 (81 years)
Frank William Taussig was an American economist who is credited with creating the foundations of modern trade theory. Early life He was born on December 28, 1859, in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of William Taussig and Adele Wuerpel. His parents encouraged his literary and musical interests, and he played the violin at an early age. He was educated in the St. Louis public schools and at Smith Academy in that same city. He then went to Washington University in St. Louis but, after a year transferred to Harvard from where he graduated in 1879.
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Hermann Roesler
1834 - 1894 (60 years)
Carl Friedrich Hermann Roesler was a German legal scholar, economist, and foreign advisor to the Meiji period Empire of Japan. Biography Early life Life in Japan In 1878, Roesler was invited by the government of Japan to serve as an advisor on international law to the Foreign Ministry. One compelling reason for his choice to move to Japan was due to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1878, Roesler faced dismissal from service in Mecklenburg due to his religion. A timely meeting with Japanese ambassador to Germany, Aoki Shūzō introduced Roesler to a new opportunity, and Roesler became on...
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Wilhelm Neurath
1840 - 1901 (61 years)
Wilhelm Neurath was an Austrian political economist of the late nineteenth century. He was professor of economics at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. He was the father of Otto Neurath.
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Arthur Twining Hadley
1856 - 1930 (74 years)
Arthur Twining Hadley was an American economist who served as President of Yale University from 1899 to 1921. Biography Hadley was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of James Hadley, Professor of Greek at Yale 1851–1872, and his wife, née Anne Loring Morris. He graduated from Yale College in 1876, where he was a member of DKE and Skull and Bones, and received prizes in English, classics and astronomy. He then studied political science at Yale , and at the University of Berlin under Adolph Wagner. He was a tutor at Yale in 1879–1883, instructor in political science in 1883–1886, professo...
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Otmar Emminger
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
Otmar Emminger was a German economist who served as the president of the Deutsche Bundesbank from 1977 to 1979. Early life and education Emminger was born in Augsburg on 2 March 1911. In 1934, he received a PhD from the University of Munich.
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Edward Webster Bemis
1860 - 1930 (70 years)
Edward Webster Bemis was an American economist and a public utility expert. He was a proponent of municipal ownership. Biography He graduated from Amherst College in 1880, and received a degree of PhD in 1885 at Johns Hopkins University after over three years' advanced work in economics and history. In 1887 he suggested the use of literacy test as a device to restrict the total number of immigrants coming into the United States. He was a pioneer lecturer in the university extension system, 1887–88; professor of economics and history, Vanderbilt University, 1889–1892; and associate professor of economics, University of Chicago, 1892-1895.
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Nikola Stoyanov
1874 - 1967 (93 years)
Nikola Stoyanov Mitov was a Bulgarian scientist, economist and financier. He was in charge of the Bulgarian Government Debt Directorate for much of the interwar period and as such, he led the prolonged negotiations over the country's foreign debt. The agreements helped stabilise the country's national currency and contributed to the economic growth Bulgaria experienced prior to World War II. Between 1929 and 1944, Stoyanov was editor-in-chief of the authoritative journal of the Bulgarian Economic Society. He was also a prominent member of various organisations of Macedonian immigrants to Bul...
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Fred Hirsch
1931 - 1978 (47 years)
Fred Hirsch was an Austrian-born British economist and professor of international studies at the University of Warwick. Biography He was born in Vienna. In 1934, after the Austrian Civil War, his family emigrated to Britain. Hirsch graduated with first class honours from the London School of Economics in 1952 before working as a financial journalist on The Banker and The Economist . He was a senior adviser to the International Monetary Fund, from 1966 to 1972 where he worked on international monetary problems.
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Rifa'a at-Tahtawi
1801 - 1873 (72 years)
Rifa'a Rafi' at-Tahtawi was an Egyptian writer, teacher, translator, Egyptologist, and intellectual of the Nahda . One of the first Egyptian travellers to France in the nineteenth century, Tahtawi published in 1834 a detailed account of his 5-year-long stay in France, Takhlīṣ al-ʾibrīz fī talkhīṣ Bārīz , and from then on became one of the first Egyptian scholars to write about Western culture in an attempt to bring about a reconciliation and an understanding between Islamic and Christian civilizations.
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Oliver M. W. Sprague
1873 - 1953 (80 years)
Oliver Mitchell Wentworth Sprague was an American economist and president of the American Economic Association in 1937. His research focused on fiscal policy and central banking. Early life and education Sprague was born to William Wallace , a businessman, and Miriam Sprague on April 22, 1873, in Somerville, Massachusetts. He attended St. Johnsbury Academy and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1894. He went on to further study at Harvard, receiving an AM in 1896 and PhD in political science in 1897.
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Paul Lambert
1912 - 1977 (65 years)
Paul Lambert was a Belgian cooperator and professor of economics at the University of Liège. Lambert gained a Doctorate in Law from the University of Liège in 1935. When Belgium was invaded in 1940 by Nazi Germany Lambert was conscripted and subsequently spent five years as a prisoner of war, which he recounted in his 1946 book Hommes perdus à l’Est . He returned to academia after the war, later becoming Chair of Political Economy at the Law Faculty of the University of Liège.
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Thomas Robert Malthus
#4867
Richard Charles Mills
1886 - 1952 (66 years)
Professor Richard Charles Mills was an Australian economist and academic. He was head of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Sydney for 23 years, and a key member of several Australian government instrumentalities.
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Helen Sumner Woodbury
1876 - 1933 (57 years)
Helen Laura Sumner Woodbury was an American economist, academic, historian and public official. Biography Woodbury was born Helen Laura Sumner on 12 March 1876 to the district attorney and later Colorado judge George True Sumner and Katherine Eudora Marsh in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Woodbury attended Wellesley College where she got her undergraduate degree in 1898 before going on to be one of the first women to earn a PhD in economics, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1908 with her thesis, "The Labor Movement in America, 1827–1837" Woodbury was influenced by her professors, including Katharine Coman and Emily Greene Balch in her undergraduate years as well as Richard T.
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Thomas A. Finlay
1848 - 1940 (92 years)
Thomas Aloysius Finlay, S.J. was an Irish Catholic priest, economist, philosopher and editor. Early life He was born on 6 July 1848 near Lanesborough, the son of William Finlay, an engineer, and his wife Maria Magan; the politician Thomas Finlay, named after him, was his nephew. His father, who died in 1864, was from Fifeshire, a Protestant convert to Catholicism; his mother was a Catholic from County Cavan.
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Maria Smith-Falkner
1878 - 1968 (90 years)
Maria Natanovna Smith-Falkner was a Soviet economist, statistician and a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1939 onwards. She was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, having joined the Bolsheviks in 1918.
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Theresa McMahon
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Theresa Schmid McMahon was an American economist, political scientist, author, and activist. She earned her PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin. She taught in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington for 26 years.
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William J. Abernathy
1933 - 1983 (50 years)
William J. Abernathy was an American professor at the Harvard Business School. With his empirical studies of the automobile industry, Abernathy contributed to explaining the industrial decline of the US automobile industry and influenced management thinking to pay more attention to innovation and long-term strategic decision making.
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Vladimir Jovanović
1833 - 1922 (89 years)
Vladimir Jovanović was a Serbian political theorist, economist, politician, philosopher, political and literary writer and activist for the unification of all Serbian lands in the Balkans. Biography Jovanović was educated at the Universities of Vienna, Berlin in agricultural and economic sciences, and Belgrade, where he stayed at the home of his father's relatives, the brothers Dimitrije and Matija Matić. Abroad, he attended the lectures of Karl Heinrich Rau's son Ludwig at Hohenhaven Agricultural Academy and Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Roscher in Vienna. In Belgrade, the Matić house was much more than just a place to stay.
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Jacobus Franciscus Haccoû
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Jacobus Franciscus Haccoû was a Dutch economist, Professor of Business Economics at the University of Amsterdam and first director of SEO Economic Research, known for his work on the futures exchange of goods and the economic situation in Dutch East Indies.
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Elli Saurio
1899 - 1966 (67 years)
Elli Saurio was a Finnish economist. She was the first professor of household economics in Europe, the first woman in Finland to hold a doctorate in economics, and the first female professor in the University of Helsinki Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry.
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John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley, was a Scottish civil servant and politician who is best known for his service in the War Cabinet during the Second World War, for which he was nicknamed the "Home Front Prime Minister". He served as Home Secretary, Lord President of the Council and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Anderson shelters are named after him.
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Sydney Chapman
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
Sir Sydney John Chapman KCB CBE was an English economist and civil servant. He was Chief Economic Adviser to HM Government from 1927 to 1932. Early life and education Chapman was born in Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, the son of a merchant. His elder brother was the chemist David Leonard Chapman. The family moved to Manchester and Chapman was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Owens College. He graduated BA in 1891 and worked as a schoolmaster at Sheffield Royal Grammar School from 1893 to 1895 before entering Trinity College, Cambridge in 1895, graduating with a double first in moral sciences in 1898.
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Germán Bernácer
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Germán Bernácer Tormo was an economist from Spain. See also Germán Bernácer Prize
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Melvin G. deChazeau
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Melvin G. de Chazeau was an American economist and the second Dean of Cornell's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management following Paul O'Leary's return to teaching. De Chazeau joined the university's College of Arts & Sciences Economics Department in 1948 and he retired from the Cornell Faculty in 1967. As a professor emeritus, de Chazeau taught at Cornell and Dartmouth College through AY 1969–1970.
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Costin Murgescu
1919 - 1989 (70 years)
Costin Ion Murgescu was a Romanian economist, jurist, journalist and diplomat. A supporter of fascism during his youth, he switched to communism by the end of World War II, and became an editor of the Communist Party daily organ, România Liberă. He taught at the University of Bucharest and worked for the Economic Research Institute. Having campaigned for multilateralism in world affairs as early as 1944, he helped to distance Romania from the Soviet Union after 1964, and later represented his country at the United Nations. He wrote extensively, publishing works on the effects of land reform a...
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Henryk Korowicz
1888 - 1941 (53 years)
Henryk Korowicz was a Polish economist, professor and rector of the Academy of Foreign Trade in Lwów. His father was Joachim Kornreich-Korowicz . He studied in Munich and Strasbourg. Before 1918, he published under the name Dr. Henryk Kornreich. During the First World War, he served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army and, after Polish independence, in the Polish Army, during the Polish-Soviet War, on the Volhynia front. He worked for several years at Bank Polski in Warsaw. After his marriage to Olga Pawłowska, a colleague and noblewoman from Bukovina, he lived in Lwów.
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John V. Van Sickle
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
John Valentine Van Sickle was a professor of economics at Vanderbilt University and Wabash College. He wrote and co-authored a number of articles on the economy of the American south. He also co-authored a principles of economics textbook with Benjamin Rogge. He was the author of Freedom in Jeopardy.
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Eiichi Sugimoto
1901 - 1952 (51 years)
Eiichi Sugimoto was a Japanese economist and professor at the Tokyo University of Commerce who was a pioneer of mathematical economics in Japan. He participated in the Tokuzō Fukuda Seminar, and majored in Marxist economics at the Tokyo University of Commerce and went on to study in Germany before returning to Japan.
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Kuo Ping-Wen
1880 - 1969 (89 years)
Kuo Ping-Wen or Guo Bingwen , courtesy name Hongsheng , was an influential Chinese educator. Biography Kuo was born in Shanghai, Jiangsu province, and his father was an elder in the Presbyterian Church. He attended Lowrie Institute , which was connected with the First Presbyterian Church in Shanghai , graduating in 1896. Kuo Ping-wen then served in the customs and postal bureaus before coming to the United States in 1906 under the sponsorship of the Presbyterian Church, at first attending the Preparatory Academy at the University of Wooster, now the College of Wooster, in Ohio, and later, in 1...
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John Pringle Nichol
1804 - 1859 (55 years)
John Pringle Nichol FRSE FRAS was a Scottish educator, phrenologist, astronomer and economist who did much to popularise astronomy in a manner that appealed to nineteenth century tastes. Early life Born at Huntly Hill, near Brechin, Angus, Nichol was the son of a gentleman farmer and was educated at the local grammar school and then studied mathematics and natural philosophy at King's College, University of Aberdeen. He then changed to study divinity. He was licensed as a preacher and became a highly effective communicator, but the impact of phrenological thinking led him to abandon the Chur...
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Claude Lucien Bergery
1787 - 1863 (76 years)
Claude Lucien Bergery was a French economist and management theorist. He was a founder of scientific management. Life The son of an innkeeper, Bergery was born in Orléans. He was a student at the École Polytechnique which he entered in 1806, He became an artillery captain, serving in Spain, and was decorated by Napoleon I during the Hundred Days. Demobilised, he taught applied science at the École royale de l'artillerie in Metz from 1817, then transferred to teacher training in the same city.
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Romesh Chunder Dutt
1848 - 1909 (61 years)
Romesh Chunder Dutt was an Indian civil servant, economic historian, translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata. He was one of the prominent proponents of Indian economic nationalism. Early life and education Dutt was born into a distinguished Bengali Maulika Kayastha family. His parents were Thakamani and Isan Chunder Dutt, a Deputy Collector in Bengal, whom Romesh often accompanied on official duties. He was educated in various Bengali District schools, then at Hare School, Calcutta. After his father's untimely death in a boat accident in eastern Bengal, his uncle, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, an accomplished writer, became his guardian in 1861.
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Johan Vogt
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Johan Herman Vogt was a Norwegian social economist, author and journal editor. Biography Vogt was born in Kristiania , Norway. He was a son of Johan Herman Lie Vogt and Martha Johanne Abigael Kinck . His father was a professor in geology at Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim. His twin brother Jørgen Herman Vogt was a newspaper editor and member of the Norwegian Parliament. His brother Fredrik Vogt was an engineer and rector at the Norwegian Institute of Technology. His brother Thorolf Vogt was a geologist and Arctic explorer.
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Luigi Amoroso
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
Luigi Amoroso was an Italian neoclassical economist influenced by Vilfredo Pareto. He provided support for and influenced the economic policy during the fascist regime. Work The microeconomical concept of the Amoroso–Robinson relation is named after him : according to paper he is one of the first economists to have studied the dynamical equilibrium theory by using an analogy between economic systems and classical mechanics, thus applying to theories of economical behaviour mathematical tools as the calculus of variation. In his young years he contributed to the theory of functions of several...
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Ruth Allen
1889 - 1979 (90 years)
Ruth Alice Allen was an American economist and academic who specialized in institutional economics. Personal life and education Allen was born on July 28, 1889, in Cameron, Texas, and earned her B.A. degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1921 and her M.A. from the same university two years later. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1931. Her doctoral advisor was Harry A. Millis and her dissertation committee included Frank Knight and Paul Douglas.
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Karl Diehl
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Karl Diehl was a German economist and professor who taught from 1908 until his death in Freiburg. He taught at the universities of Heidelberg and Freiburg, known for teaching on the subject of Anarchism.
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Ewald Bosse
1880 - 1956 (76 years)
Ewald Theodor Alfred Bosse was a Swedish-Norwegian sociologist and economist. He was born in Stockholm as a son of bookseller and publisher Johan Heinrich Wilhelm Bosse and Anne-Marie Lehmann . He was a brother of Alma Fahlstrøm and Harriet Bosse. He took the doctorate in Kiel in 1914 on the thesis Norwegens Stellung im internationalen Wirtschaftsleben vom 16. Jarhundert bis zur Gegenwart. He was a professor in Kiel from 1920 to 1926 and 1948 to his death. He died in September 1956 in Oslo.
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Charles F. Marsh
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Charles Franklin Marsh was an American economist and academic who became the seventh president of Wofford College on September 1, 1958, and served until his retirement in 1968. A 1925 graduate of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, he earned the Master of Arts from the University of Illinois in 1926, and the Ph.D. from Illinois in 1928. He was a faculty member at American University, and from 1930 to 1958, a professor of economics at the College of William and Mary. In his last six years at William and Mary, he was Dean of the Faculty. He was involved in civic affairs in Williamsburg, serving on several economic planning agencies.
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Gasparo Scaruffi
1519 - 1584 (65 years)
Gasparo Scaruffi , from Reggio Emilia was an Italian economist who proposed a universal currency in order to facilitate an open, objective and just economic system, which, he argued, was the essential foundation of a just society.
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Abul Fazal Atwar Husain
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Abul Fazal Atwar Husain was a Bangladeshi economist. Early life Husain was born on 21 August 1918 in Noakhali, Noakhali District, East Bengal, British India. His father was from Bogra and was in Noakhali working as the deputy magistrate. He graduated from Noakhali Zilla School and then Dhaka College. He graduated from Dhaka University with a double major in economics and political science. He moved to London in 1938. He studied at the London School of Economics, finished another undergrad degree and a master's degree, and graduated in 1943. He worked as an extended lecturer at the India House...
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Frederic George Young
1858 - 1929 (71 years)
Frederic George Young was an educator in the U.S. state of Oregon. He was born in Burnett, Wisconsin on June 3, 1858, and after graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1886, he taught in Wisconsin and South Dakota. He moved to Portland in 1890, and served as principal at its high school and as president of Albany College before being appointed professor of economics and history at the University of Oregon in 1895. He was a founding officer of the Oregon Historical Society in 1898, and as editor of its Oregon Historical Quarterly from its founding in 1900 through the December 1928 issue. He served on the Oregon Commission for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.
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Faith M. Williams
1893 - 1958 (65 years)
Faith Moors Williams was an American economist who became Director of the Office of Foreign Labor Conditions in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Williams graduated from Wellesley College in 1915, and earned a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1924. Her doctoral dissertation was The Food Manufacturing Industries in New York and its Environs: Present Trends and Probable Future Developments. She then worked on rural nutrition as an assistant professor in the College of Home Economics at Cornell University, and assisted with the economic components of the Middletown studies.
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Garfield V. Cox
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Garfield Vestal Cox was a leading authority on business fluctuations and forecasting. He was one of the first people to study the performance of experts versus novices in forecasting stock prices. He was also the Dean of the University of Chicago School of Business.
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Kate Claghorn
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Kate Holladay Claghorn was an American sociologist, economist, statistician, legal scholar, and Progressive Era activist, who became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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Grace Raymond Hebard
1861 - 1936 (75 years)
Grace Raymond Hebard was an American historian, suffragist, scholar, writer, political economist, and noted University of Wyoming educator. Hebard's standing as a historian in part rose from her years trekking Wyoming's high plains and mountains seeking first-hand accounts of Wyoming's early pioneers. Today, her books on Wyoming history are sometimes challenged due to her romanticization of the Old West, spurring questions regarding accuracy of her research findings. In particular, her conclusion after decades of field research that Sacajawea was buried in Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reserva...
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