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,
#4851
Edward Ronald Walker
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Sir Edward Ronald Walker was an Australian diplomat and economist who served as Australia's Permanent Representative to the United Nations and Ambassador to Germany, Japan, and France. Early life and education Walker was born on 26 January 1907 in Cobar, New South Wales the, eldest child of Frederick Thomas Walker, a Methodist minister, and Mary Melvina Annie Walker, née King. Born into a prominent family in the Methodist movement, Walker's mother was also the daughter of a Methodist minister and his paternal cousin was the Methodist minister and social activist Sir Alan Walker. Nevertheles...
Go to Profile#4852
Lazarus Aaronson
1894 - 1966 (72 years)
Lazarus Leonard Aaronson , often referred to as L. Aaronson, was a British poet and a lecturer in economics. As a young man, he belonged to a group of Jewish friends who are today known as the Whitechapel Boys, many of whom later achieved fame as writers and artists. Though less radical in his use of language, he has been compared to his more renowned Whitechapel friend, Isaac Rosenberg, in terms of diction and verbal energy. Aaronson's poetry is characterised more as 'post-Georgian' than modernistic, and reviewers have since been able to trace influences back to both the English poet John Ke...
Go to Profile#4853
John Bovingdon
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
John Bovingdon was a modern dancer-turned-economic analyst who performed regularly at the Kings Road House of architect R.M. Schindler in Los Angeles in the 1920s. He studied economics at Harvard and graduated with high honors in 1915. After graduation, he moved to Japan and worked as a professor of economics at Keio University until 1920. He was fired from his post at the Office of Economic Warfare in 1943 following "publication of assertions that Bovingdon used to be a ballet dancer and once had Communist associations."
Go to Profile#4854
Kenneth K. Kurihara
1910 - 1972 (62 years)
Kenneth Kenkichi Kurihara was a distinguished professor of economic theory at the State University of New York. He was a noted post-Keynesian economist who worked on Keynesian dynamics, growth, development economics and monetary theory and public policy. He was born in Kutchan, Hokkaido Japan but moved to the US where he worked first for the government as a research economist, then as an academic at Princeton University, Rutgers University and then at the State University of New York.
Go to Profile#4855
Robert Aaron Gordon
1908 - 1978 (70 years)
Robert Aaron Gordon was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley from 1938 to 1976. In 1975, he served as president of the American Economic Association.
Go to Profile#4856
John Jewkes
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
John Jewkes was a British classical liberal economist. He was Professor of Economic Organisation at Merton College, Oxford. His main work, Ordeal by Planning, was written in 1946 and argued that the central planning implemented in the United Kingdom during World War II will lead to poverty if it is adopted as a permanent economic system, a thesis quite similar to the one developed by Friedrich Hayek in 1945 in The Road to Serfdom. His line of thought was close to the ordoliberal thesis of Wilhelm Röpke and Walter Eucken.
Go to Profile#4857
Emory Richard Johnson
1864 - 1950 (86 years)
Emory Richard Johnson was a United States economist who specialized in transportation issues. Biography Johnson was born in Waupun, Wisconsin. He studied at University of Wisconsin and University of Pennsylvania . He was instructor of economics at Haverford College 1893-96. He became professor of transportation and commerce at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896, and was dean of its Wharton School from 1919 to 1933. He served as expert on transportation on the United States Industrial Commission, and was a member on valuation of railway property for the United States Census Bureau , and as expert on traffic on the National Waterways Commission of 1909.
Go to Profile#4858
Leon C. Marshall
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Leon Carroll Marshall was an American economist, Professor of Political Economy and fourth dean of the Booth School of Business from 1909 to 1924, Professor at the Law School of the Johns Hopkins University, and Professor at the American University. He is known for his works on our economic organization, business administration, curriculum-making in the social studies and the divorce court.
Go to Profile#4859
Allan Flanders
1910 - 1973 (63 years)
Allan Flanders was a British academic, author, and founding member of the Oxford School of Industrial Relations, along with Hugh Clegg, Alan Fox, Lord William McCarthy, Sir George Bain and Otto Kahn-Freund. The school was a developer of the idea of collective bargaining and overall proponents of bargaining power, legal contracts, normative regulation and institutionalized conflict resolutions as issues of significance and focus in the field of industrial relations.
Go to Profile#4860
John Elliott Cairnes
1823 - 1875 (52 years)
John Elliott Cairnes was an Irish political economist. He has been described as the "last of the classical economists". Biography John Cairnes was born at Castlebellingham, County Louth. He was the son of William Elliott Cairnes of Stameen, near Drogheda, and Marianne Woolsey, whose mother was the sister of Sir William Bellingham, 1st Baronet of Castlebellingham. John's father decided upon a business career, against the wishes of his mother , and became a partner in the Woolsey Brewery at Castlebellingham. In 1825, William Cairnes started on his own account in Drogheda, making the Drogheda Brewery an unqualified success.
Go to Profile#4861
D. H. MacGregor
1877 - 1953 (76 years)
David Hutchison MacGregor was a Scottish economist and Drummond Professor of Political Economy at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, from 1921 to 1945. Early life He was born in Monifieth in Angus, the third child of the Rev Robert MacGregor minister of the Free Church of Scotland, and his wife, Lillias Hannah Hutchison .
Go to Profile#4862
Alain Combes
#4863
Lewis Cecil Gray
1881 - 1952 (71 years)
Lewis Cecil Gray was an American agricultural economist. A prolific author of economic texts, his career included several academic posts and various federal government roles. His monumental History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 is considered a major contribution to economic history and agricultural economics. Gray held key positions in New Deal programs designed to alleviate land use problems arising from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.
Go to Profile#4864
Richard Ehrenberg
1857 - 1921 (64 years)
Richard Ehrenberg was a German economist. He taught at Rostock University from 1899 to 1921. Literary works Hamburg und Antwerpen seit 300 Jahren, 1889Hamburg und England im Zeitalter der Königin Elisabeth, 1896Das Zeitalter der Fugger, 2 Vols., 1896, -- an English translation is also available: Richard Ehrenberg, Capital & Finance in the Age of the Renaissance: A Study of the Fuggers and Their Connections, 1928, reprinted 1985Das Familie in ihrer Bedeutung für das Volksleben, 1916
Go to Profile#4865
Elizabeth Brunner
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Elizabeth Brunner was a British economist, best known for her work in industrial economics with Philip Andrews. Brunner was partly responsible for "the resuscitation of industrial economics", giving the subject a new theoretical basis by defining an industry, as separate from a market, based on a group of firms with similar processes of production. Together with Andrews she made several contributions to business history: Capital Development in Steel , The Eagle Ironworkers, Oxford and, their biography of British industrialist, The Life of Lord Nuffield . Her clear style and disciplined approach contributed a lot to their joint work.
Go to Profile#4866
Gheorghe Zane
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Gheorghe Zane was a Romanian economist and historian. Born in Galați, he attended Vasile Alecsandri National College before enrolling in the law faculty of the University of Iași. He graduated from that institution in 1920, earning a doctorate from the University of Bucharest in 1923. His first teaching job, from 1921 to 1924, was at the agriculture faculty in Iași, where his courses dealt with political economy. Securing a post as associate professor in the same subject at the Iași law faculty in 1924, he advanced to full professor in 1929, teaching the history of economic doctrines. The following year, he switched to teaching political economy and finance, continuing to do so until 1945.
Go to Profile#4867
Walter W. Stewart
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Walter W. Stewart was an American economist and banking expert. He was an economics advisor to four presidents, Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt and Eisenhower. Education and career Stewart graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Missouri in 1909. He was a professor of economics at the University of Missouri, the University of Michigan and Amherst College. He joined the faculty of the School of Economics and Politics at the Institute for Advanced Study on September 1, 1938, and remained there until his death in 1958.
Go to Profile#4868
Liston Pope
1909 - 1974 (65 years)
Liston Corlando Pope was an American clergyman, author, theological educator, and dean of Yale University Divinity School from 1949 to 1962. Early life Pope was born in Thomasville, North Carolina, the son of Robie Lester Pope and his wife, née Dora Vivian Younts. Robie Pope was a banker, a city councilman andmayor of Thomasville, and had served in the North Carolina House of Representatives. Liston Pope considered his father to be a "banker with a conscience" and an inspiration in his study of social problems from the Christian point of view.
Go to Profile#4869
Joseph French Johnson
1853 - 1925 (72 years)
Joseph French Johnson was an American economist, journalist, Professor, and Dean of the School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance, New York University, and founding Dean of the Alexander Hamilton Institute in New York in 1909.
Go to Profile#4870
Martha Steffy Browne
1898 - 1990 (92 years)
Martha Steffy Browne was an Austrian American economist. A student of Ludwig von Mises, she earned a doctorate in political economy in 1921 from the University of Vienna, one of the first women to do so. Of Jewish descent, Browne emigrated to the United States in 1939, later becoming a professor of economics at Brooklyn College .
Go to Profile#4871
Johann Friedrich von Pfeiffer
1718 - 1787 (69 years)
Johann Friedrich von Pfeiffer was one of the most important German figures of political economy of the 18th century along with Philipp von Hörnigk and Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi. He was a leading practitioner in Cameralism and mercantilism.
Go to Profile#4872
May Louise Cowles
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
May Louise Cowles was an American economist, researcher, author, and advocate of Home Economics. She was a member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1915 to 1958. She had many submissions published in the Journal of Home Economics, the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, and Rural Sociology. She also produced several widely read pamphlets, including Meeting Housing Needs of Older People in Rural Areas , and spoke at a string of national seminars to encourage the addition of family economics to home economics instruction across the United States.
Go to Profile#4873
James A. Field
1880 - 1927 (47 years)
James Alfred Field was an American economist and Professor of Political Economy at the University of Chicago, known as one of the proponents of institutional economics and as demographer, who contributed to the theory of population and its history.
Go to Profile#4874
Larry Neal
1937 - 1981 (44 years)
Larry Neal or Lawrence Neal was a scholar of African-American theatre. He is well known for his contributions to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a major influence in pushing for black culture to focus less on integration with White culture, to that of celebrating their differences within an equally important and meaningful artistic and political field, thus celebrating Black Heritage.
Go to Profile#4875
Nancy Lou Schwartz
1939 - 1981 (42 years)
Nancy Lou Schwartz was an American economist and professor who researched decision sciences and methods of dynamic optimization. Life and career Nancy L. Schwartz earned her AB at Oberlin College in 1960 and attended graduate school at Purdue University, where she received her MS and PhD . While at Purdue, one of her classmates was fellow economist Morton I. Kamien with whom she would publish many academic works.
Go to Profile#4876
Johan Henrik Åkerman
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Johan Henrik Åkerman was a Swedish economist and was a Professor of Economics and Statistics at Lund University. He was the younger brother to Swedish economist Johan Gustav Åkerman. He got an MBA at Stockholm School of Economics 1918. He then studied at Harvard University 1919-1920, and again in Sweden, he studied among other statistics in the Universities in Uppsala and Lund. He became PhD in 1929 with the thesis about the economic life rhythm which was the first Swedish dissertation that contained elements of econometrics.
Go to Profile#4877
Joseph Hiam Levy
1838 - 1913 (75 years)
Joseph Hiam Levy was an English author and economist. He was educated at the City of London School and joined the Civil Service. He later became a lecturer in economics at Birkbeck College and an important figure in the Personal Rights Association.
Go to Profile#4878
Sidney Weintraub
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Sidney Weintraub was an American economist, one of the most prominent American members of the Post Keynesian economics school. He was the co-founder and co-editor of The Journal of Post Keynesian Economics . His views included criticism of monetarism and the neoclassical synthesis, and promotion of the tax-based incomes policy .
Go to Profile#4879
James Wilke Nisbet
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
James Wilkie Nisbet was a Scottish economist. He gained a double first in economic science and philosophy, and an LLB with distinction at the University of Glasgow. Between 1926 and 1931 he served as assistant to W. R. Scott, the Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow.
Go to Profile#4880
Fang Zong'ao
1884 - 1950 (66 years)
Fang Zong'ao was a late Qing dynasty scholar; a well known economist and jurist in the early Republic of China era, and a professor in economics and law. Fang was born in Puning, Guangdong Province, China, in 1884. In 1903, Fang went to for study. In 1905, Fang returned to his home town Puning after he graduated from the college and established a teachers' college in Puning. In 1908, Fang was granted a scholarship from Qing dynasty government and went to Japan again for his studies. After graduating from Yamaguchi Business School in Yamaguchi Prefecture Fang was admitted to Meiji University.
Go to Profile#4881
Eduard Heimann
1889 - 1967 (78 years)
Eduard Magnus Mortier Heimann was a German economist and social scientist who advocated ethical socialist programs in Germany in the 1920s and later in the United States. He was hostile to capitalism but thought it was possible to combine the advantages of a market economy with those of socialism through competing economic units governed by strong state controls.
Go to Profile#4882
Edward C. Harwood
1900 - 1980 (80 years)
Edward Crosby Harwood was an economist, philosopher of science, and investment advisor who is most known for founding the nonprofit American Institute for Economic Research in 1933, which survives today in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. AIER is a scientific research organization specialized in economics. It is one of the oldest nonprofit research organizations in the U.S. It is the parent of a for-profit subsidiary, American Investment Services, Inc.
Go to Profile#4883
Adam Contzen
1571 - 1635 (64 years)
Adam Contzen was a German Jesuit economist and exegete. Contzen was born in 1573, or, according to Carlos Sommervogel, in 1575. Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz gives the 1571 date listed above. Contzen entered the Society of Jesus at Trier in 1595. He was professor of philosophy in the University of Würzburg in 1606, and was transferred to the University of Mainz in 1610, where he occupied the chair of Holy Scripture for more than ten years. He had a share in the organization of the University of Molsheim, in Alsace, of which he was chancellor in 1622-23.
Go to Profile#4884
Lev Kritzman
1890 - 1938 (48 years)
Lev Natanovich Kritzman was a Soviet Marxian economist who became a prominent advocate of state planning in the 1920s Soviet economy. However after 1929, his views on agricultural reform were aligned with mass collectivisation and dekulakization introduced by Joseph Stalin.
Go to Profile#4885
László Radványi
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
László Radványi , also known as Johann Lorenz Schmidt, was a Hungarian-German writer and academic. Life Childhood and early career Radványi was born into a Jewish family in Hungary. As a boy, Radványi attended a grammar school on Marko Street in Budapest. While attending grammar school, at the age of 16, he authored a book of poetry, which received a preface from Frigyes Karinthy. Radványi studied economics and philosophy at the University of Budapest from 1918 to 1919, where he became involved in radical politics. With the destruction of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 he fled to Vienn...
Go to Profile#4886
Kunio Maruyama
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Kunio Maruyama was a Japanese businessman, adventurer, and college professor of English and economics. He was one of the three Japanese men who were secretly sent from Xinjing's Japanese Society, that led to the successful repatriation of most of the 1.6 million Japanese who had been trapped in the former Manchukuo at the end of World War II.
Go to Profile#4887
Sedley Cudmore
1878 - 1945 (67 years)
Sedley Anthony Cudmore was a Canadian economist, academic, civil servant and Canada's second Dominion Statistician. Early years Cudmore was born in County Cork, Ireland. At age 9 he and his family immigrated to Canada.
Go to Profile#4888
Sidney Sherwood
1860 - 1901 (41 years)
Sidney Sherwood was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University from 1892 to 1901, where he succeeded his teacher Richard T. Ely who had left for the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as head of the political economy program. Although a student of Ely's, Sherwood was one of the early American Marginalists.
Go to Profile#4889
Richmond Mayo-Smith
1854 - 1901 (47 years)
Richmond Mayo-Smith was an American economist noted for his work in statistics. He was born in Troy, Ohio, educated at Amherst College , then at Berlin and Heidelberg University. He became assistant professor of economics at Columbia University in 1877. He was an adjunct professor from 1878 to 1883, when he was appointed professor of political economy and social science, a post which he held until his death in 1901.
Go to Profile#4890
George W. Stocking Sr.
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
George Ward Stocking Sr. was an American economist, who was one of the pioneers of industrial organization and an early writer on international cartels. After completing a Ph.D. degree from Columbia University in 1925, he was professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin from 1926 to 1947. During 1933-1943 he held several positions with the federal government, including the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he advised Attorney General Thurman Arnold. He founded and was professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Vanderbilt University in 1947, where he remained from 1947 to 1963.
Go to Profile#4891
Terence C. Mills
#4892
Otto Nathan
1893 - 1987 (94 years)
Otto Nathan was an economist who taught at Princeton University , New York University , Vassar College , and Howard University . Nathan was a close friend of Albert Einstein for many years and was designated by Einstein as co-trustee of his literary estate with Helen Dukas.
Go to Profile#4893
Charles Henry Hull
1864 - 1936 (72 years)
Charles Henry Hull was an American economist and historian. He worked at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. In 1900, he was appointed professor of American History. In 1899, he published The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty in two volumes. This edition has become the standard source for referring to the economic writings of Sir William Petty .
Go to Profile#4894
Nicolai Rygg
1872 - 1957 (85 years)
Nicolai Theodorius Nilssen Rygg was a Norwegian economist and Governor of the Central Bank of Norway. Biography He was born in Stavanger as a son of shoemaker Ole Nilssen Rygg and Ane Severine Larsdatter . He was a brother of journalist Andreas Nilsen Rygg. In 1910 he married physician's daughter Agnes Isidore Margrethe Sibbern Møller .
Go to Profile#4895
Heinrich Herkner
1863 - 1932 (69 years)
Heinrich Herkner was a German economist as well as a social reformer. Biography Herkner was born in Liberec , Bohemia and died in Berlin, Germany. Herkner studied with Lujo Brentano in Strasbourg. Later he taught as a professor at the universities of Freiburg , Karlsruhe , and Zürich , as well as the Technical University and Frederick William University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#4896
William Morris Leiserson
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
William Morris Leiserson was a labor relations scholar and mediator. Leiserson was a professor, state and federal government administrator, mediator, arbitrator, and a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "brain trust," which developed and wrote legislation such as the Railway Labor Act of 1934.
Go to Profile#4897
George Cyril Allen
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
George Cyril Allen , published as G. C. Allen, was a British economist and academic. He was Brunner Professor of Economic Science at the University of Liverpool from 1933 to 1947, and then Professor of Political Economy at University College London from 1947 to 1967. He wrote on Japanese and British industrial policy.
Go to Profile#4898
Warren M. Persons
1878 - 1937 (59 years)
Warren M. Persons was an American economist. He was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, and a professor of economics at Colorado College and Harvard University. He was the President of the American Statistical Association in 1923.
Go to Profile#4899
Noel Frederick Hall
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Sir Noel Frederick Hall was an economist and academic who was one of Britain's earliest post-war specialists in business theory and education. He was Professor of Political Economy at University College London, co-founder of what is now Henley Business School and Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford.
Go to Profile#4900
Thomas Gresham
1519 - 1579 (60 years)
Sir Thomas Gresham the Elder was an English merchant and financier who acted on behalf of King Edward VI and Edward's half-sisters, queens Mary I and Elizabeth I . In 1565 Gresham founded the Royal Exchange in the City of London.
Go to Profile