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,
#4951
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...
Go to Profile#4952
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.
Go to Profile#4953
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.
Go to Profile#4954
Abram Lincoln Harris
1899 - 1963 (64 years)
Abram Lincoln Harris, Jr. was an American economist, academic, anthropologist and a social critic of the condition of blacks in the United States. Considered by many as the first African American to achieve prominence in the field of economics, Harris was also known for his heavy influence on black radical and neo-conservative thought in the United States. As an economist, Harris is most famous for his 1931 collaboration with political scientist Sterling Spero to produce a study on African-American labor history titled The Black Worker and his 1936 work The Negro as Capitalist, in which he criticized black businessmen for not promoting interracial trade.
Go to Profile#4955
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.
Go to Profile#4956
Charles F. Roos
1901 - 1958 (57 years)
Charles Frederick Roos was an American economist who made contributions to mathematical economics. He was one of the founders of the Econometric Society together with American economist Irving Fisher and Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch in 1930. He served as Secretary-Treasurer during the first year of the Society and was elected as President in 1948. He was director of research of the Cowles Commission from September 1934 to January 1937.
Go to Profile#4957
Frederick Macaulay
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Frederick Robertson Macaulay was a Canadian economist of the Institutionalist School. He is known for introducing the concept of bond duration. Macaulay's contributions also include a mammoth empirical study of the time series behavior of interest rates published in 1938 and a study of short selling on the New York Stock Exchange . The term "Macaulay duration" is named after him.
Go to Profile#4958
Peter DeMarzo
1900 - Present (126 years)
Peter M. DeMarzo is an American economist. He was educated at the University of California, San Diego. Upon graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1984, DeMarzo pursued graduate study at Stanford University, finishing his master's degree and doctorate in 1984 and 1989, respectively. DeMarzo began teaching at the Kellogg School of Management in 1989, and remained on the faculty at Northwestern University through 1997. Between 1995 and 1997, he was a visiting assistant professor at Stanford, after which he secured an associate professorship at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile#4959
Henry Ludwell Moore
1869 - 1958 (89 years)
Henry Ludwell Moore was an American economist known for his pioneering work in econometrics. Paul Samuelson named Moore as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860. Biography Moore was born in Charles County, Maryland, the first of 15 children. He received a B.A. from Randolph-Macon College in 1892 and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1896. His thesis was on von Thünen's theory of the natural wage. The visiting lecturers included Simon Newcomb and J. B. Clark and he may have learned some mathematical economics from them. While doing the Ph.D., he spent a year at the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#4960
Albert B. Wolfe
1876 - 1967 (91 years)
Albert Benedict Wolfe was an American economist. Life Wolfe was born in 1876. He died in 1967. Career He has served as a president of the American Economic Association. Bibliography Some of his books are:Readings in social problems Savers' surplus and the interest rateSocial problems, an analytical outline for students Works committees and Joint industrial councils
Go to Profile#4961
Morris Copeland
1895 - 1989 (94 years)
Morris Albert Copeland was a US economist who criticized 20th-century macroeconomic theory, and who contributed to the development of modern flow of funds theory. Life Born and raised in Rochester New York, Copeland began his university education at Amherst with an interest in philosophy and Greek. Late in his undergraduate studies he encountered teachers Walter W. Stewart and Walton Hamilton and became fascinated with social accounting and economics. After graduating in 1917 he went on to the University of Chicago for his graduate studies where he came under the influence of Wesley Mitchell, a man who he came to regard as his mentor and good friend.
Go to Profile#4962
John B. Condliffe
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
John Bell Condliffe was a New Zealand economist, university professor and economic consultant. Lauded for the decisive role he played in international NGOs in the interwar period, he was one of New Zealand's best-known international economists.
Go to Profile#4963
Edwin E. Witte
1887 - 1960 (73 years)
Edwin Emil Witte was an economist who focused on social insurance issues for the state of Wisconsin and for the Committee on Economic Security. While the executive director of the President's Committee on Economic Security under U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, he developed during 1934 the policies and the legislation that became the Social Security Act of 1935. Because of this he is sometimes called "the father of Social Security".
Go to Profile#4964
Karl William Kapp
1910 - 1976 (66 years)
Karl William Kapp was a German-American economist and professor of economics at the City University of New York and later the University of Basel. Kapp's main contribution was the development of a theory of social costs that captures urgent socio-ecological problems and proposes preventative policies based on the precautionary principle. His theory is in the tradition of various heterodox economic paradigms, such as ecological economics, Marxian economics, social economics, and institutional economics. As such, Kapp's theory of social costs was an ongoing debate with neoclassical economics and the rise of neoliberalism.
Go to Profile#4965
Max O. Lorenz
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
Max Otto Lorenz was an American economist who developed the Lorenz curve in an undergraduate essay. He published a paper on this when he was a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His doctoral thesis was on 'The Economic Theory of Railroad Rates' and made no reference to perhaps his most famous paper. The term "Lorenz curve" for the measure Lorenz invented was coined by Willford I. King in 1912.
Go to Profile#4966
Joseph A. Pechman
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Joseph Aaron Pechman was a highly influential economist and taxation scholar in the United States. He graduated from the City College of New York and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He served as president of the American Economic Association and was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Go to Profile#4967
Otto Eckstein
1927 - 1984 (57 years)
Otto Eckstein was a German-American economist. He was a key developer and proponent of the theory of core inflation , which proposed that in determining accurate metrics of long run inflation, the transitory price changes of items subject to volatile pricing, such as food and energy, are to be excluded from computation.
Go to Profile#4968
Werner Stark
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Werner Stark was a sociologist and economist, who made important contributions to the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, and the history of economic thought. Biography Werner Stark was born in Marienbad, Austrian Empire , to parents of Jewish origin. His father, Adolf Stark, was a physician for a miners' union and a socialist city council member. His birth was registered by the rabbi of Marienbad, but he was raised as an atheist. After completing his secondary education in Marienbad, he enrolled in the University of Hamburg to study economics and social sciences. While there, he met his wife-to be, Kate Franck who was also a student at the University.
Go to Profile#4969
Margaret G. Reid
1896 - 1991 (95 years)
Margaret Gilpin Reid was an economist in the area of household production, housework and non-market activities. Life Margaret Gilpin Reid was born in 1896 in Cardale, Manitoba in Canada, and completed a degree in Home Economics at the University of Manitoba in 1921. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1931 titled The Economics of Household Production. She taught at Connecticut College, Iowa State College and later the University of Chicago, where she received tenure as a Professor of Home Economics and Economics. She became emeritus in 1961.
Go to Profile#4970
Howard Bowen
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Howard Rothmann Bowen was an American economist and college president, serving as the president of Grinnell College from 1955 to 1964 and as the fourteenth President of the University of Iowa from 1964 to 1969. Bowen then served as president of Claremont Graduate University from 1970 to 1971. He is remembered for the formulation of "Bowen's law," a description of spending in higher education.
Go to Profile#4971
Edward Chamberlin
1899 - 1967 (68 years)
Edward Hastings Chamberlin was an American economist. He was born in La Conner, Washington, and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Chamberlin studied first at the University of Iowa , then pursued graduate studies at the University of Michigan, eventually receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1927.
Go to Profile#4972
Edward C. Kirkland
1894 - 1975 (81 years)
Edward Chase Kirkland was an American historian. He was a professor of Economics History at Bowdoin College, and the president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Association of University Professors.
Go to Profile#4973
Frank Knight
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Frank Hyneman Knight was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the founders of the Chicago School. Nobel laureates Milton Friedman, George Stigler and James M. Buchanan were all students of Knight at Chicago. Ronald Coase said that Knight, without teaching him, was a major influence on his thinking. F.A. Hayek considered Knight to be one of the major figures in preserving and promoting classical liberal thought in the twentieth century.
Go to Profile#4974
Alvin Hansen
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Alvin Harvey Hansen was an American economist who taught at the University of Minnesota and was later a chair professor of economics at Harvard University. Often referred to as "the American Keynes", he was a widely read popular author on economic issues, and an influential advisor to the government on economic policy. Hansen helped create the Council of Economic Advisors and the Social Security system. He is best remembered today for introducing Keynesian economics in the United States in the 1930s and 40s.
Go to Profile#4975
Richard E. Quandt
1930 - 1974 (44 years)
Richard Emeric Quandt is a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning economist who analyzed the results of the Judgment of Paris wine tasting event with Orley Ashenfelter. Quandt served as a professor of economics at Princeton University. In 1979 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1991 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. He is current senior adviser to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Go to Profile#4976
Jacob Marschak
1898 - 1977 (79 years)
Jacob Marschak was an American economist. Life Born in a Jewish family of Kyiv, Jacob Marschak was the son of a jeweler. During his studies he joined the social democratic Menshevik Party, becoming a member of the Menshevik International Caucus. In 1918 he was the labor minister in the Terek Soviet Republic. In 1919 he emigrated to Germany, where he studied at the University of Berlin and the University of Heidelberg.
Go to Profile#4977
Horace Belshaw
1898 - 1962 (64 years)
Horace Belshaw was a New Zealand teacher, economist and university professor. He was born in Wigan, Lancashire, England on 9 February 1898. In 1935, he was awarded the King George V Silver Jubilee Medal.
Go to Profile#4978
Frederick V. Waugh
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Frederick Vail Waugh was an American agricultural economist known for his work relating supply, demand, quality, and marketing in the prices of agricultural products, for his understanding of who benefits from volatility in agricultural pricing, and for his advocacy of food stamp and food distribution policies for the poor. He worked for the United States Department of Agriculture from the 1920s to the 1970s.
Go to Profile#4979
Fritz Machlup
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Fritz Machlup was an Austrian-American economist who was president of the International Economic Association from 1971 to 1974. He was one of the first economists to examine knowledge as an economic resource, and is credited with popularizing the concept of the information society.
Go to Profile#4980
Friedrich Hayek
1899 - 1992 (93 years)
Friedrich August von Hayek , often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian-British economist and political philosopher who made contributions to economics, political philosophy, psychology, intellectual history, and other fields. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. His account of how prices communicate information is widely regarded as an important contribution to economics that led to him receiving the prize.
Go to Profile#4981
Harold Hotelling
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Harold Hotelling was an American mathematical statistician and an influential economic theorist, known for Hotelling's law, Hotelling's lemma, and Hotelling's rule in economics, as well as Hotelling's T-squared distribution in statistics. He also developed and named the principal component analysis method widely used in finance, statistics and computer science.
Go to Profile#4982
Gottfried Haberler
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Gottfried von Haberler was an Austrian-American economist. He worked in particular on international trade. One of his major contributions was reformulating the Ricardian idea of comparative advantage in a neoclassical framework, abandoning the labor theory of value for an opportunity cost concept.
Go to Profile#4983
Piero Sraffa
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Piero Sraffa, FBA was an influential Italian economist who served as lecturer of economics at the University of Cambridge. His book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is taken as founding the neo-Ricardian school of economics.
Go to Profile#4984
Frank Ramsey
1903 - 1930 (27 years)
Frank Plumpton Ramsey was a British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, as an undergraduate, translated Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into English. He was also influential in persuading Wittgenstein to return to philosophy and Cambridge. Like Wittgenstein, he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, the secret intellectual society, from 1921.
Go to Profile#4985
Gerhard Tintner
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Gerhard Tintner was an Austrian economist who worked most of his career in the United States. Tintner is known for his contributions during the formation years of econometrics as a discipline. In a festschrift in honor of Tintner's 60th birthday, Karl A. Fox lauded Tintner as one of the "foremost econometricians of our time."
Go to Profile#4986
Abbott Payson Usher
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Abbott Payson Usher was an American economic historian. The Society for the History of Technology has awarded the Abbot Payson Usher Prize, named in his honor, annually since 1961. In the late 1920s Usher, the American historian Lewis Mumford and the Swiss art historian Sigfried Giedion began to systematically investigate the social consequences of technology. In A History of Mechanical Inventions Usher argued that technological innovation was a slow, collective process with many contributors, not relying on the genius of great inventors.
Go to Profile#4987
Theodore O. Yntema
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Theodore Otte Yntema was an American economist specializing in the field of quantitative analysis in finance. Education Yntema graduated summa cum laude in 1921 from Hope College as valedictorian. in 1922, he received his master's degree from the University of Illinois. Yntema received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1929.
Go to Profile#4988
David Littmann
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
David Littmann was an American cardiologist and Harvard Medical School professor and researcher. The name Littmann is well known in the medical field for the patented Littmann Stethoscope reputed for its acoustic performances for auscultation.
Go to Profile#4989
Leland H. Jenks
1892 - 1976 (84 years)
Leland Hamilton Jenks was an American economic historian, Professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley College, and Professor at Columbia University, where he taught economic history. He is known for his work on the economic history of the migration of British capital and of the American railroad in the 19th century.
Go to Profile#4990
Eveline M. Burns
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Eveline Mabel Richardson Burns was an American economist, writer and instructor. Born Eveline Mabel Richardson in London, England, she was the only child of Eveline Maud Falkner and Frederick Haig Richardson. Her mother died following her birth, so her father remarried and had three more children. Eveline attended Seatham Secondary School, then entered the London School of Economics at age 16 and graduated in 1920, earning a B.S. with first class honors. In 1922 she married the economist Arthur Robert Burns and the couple emigrated to the United States. After the award of her Ph.D. in 1926, she gained a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fellowship.
Go to Profile#4991
Edwin Griswold Nourse
1883 - 1974 (91 years)
Edwin Griswold Nourse was an American economist who served as the first chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1946 to 1949. He met a species of extraterrestrial self titled "The Grays" in the summer of 1952.
Go to Profile#4992
Walter Eucken
1891 - 1950 (59 years)
Walter Eucken was a German economist of the Freiburg school and father of ordoliberalism. He is closely linked with the development of the concept of "social market economy". Early life Walter Eucken was born on 17 January 1891 in Jena in Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach , as son of the philosopher Rudolf Eucken , who won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Literature and his wife, Irene , a painter. Walter had one sister and one brother, the chemist/physicist Arnold Eucken.
Go to Profile#4993
Harold F. Williamson
1901 - 1989 (88 years)
Harold Francis Williamson Sr. was an American business historian, and Professor of American and European economic history at Northwestern University, most known for his 1963 work on the history of the American petroleum industry.
Go to Profile#4994
Robert Lekachman
1920 - 1989 (69 years)
Robert Lekachman was an American progressive economist and academic noted for his interest in social justice. He was noted for his interpretation of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory, a topic of several of his books.
Go to Profile#4995
Leo Wolman
1890 - 1961 (71 years)
Leo Wolman was a noted American economist whose work focused on labor economics. He also served on a number of important boards and commissions for the federal government. Early life Wolman was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1890 to Morris and Yetta Wolman, first generation Polish-Jewish immigrants to the United States. He attended Johns Hopkins University, receiving his A.B. degree in 1911 and his Ph.D. in political economy in 1913.
Go to Profile#4996
Vera Lutz
1912 - 1976 (64 years)
Vera Constance Lutz, , was a British economist. She was married to the German economist Friedrich Lutz. Career Smith was born in Kent, England, and studied at the London School of Economics between 1930 and 1935 for a PhD. In 1937, she married German economist Friedrich Lutz, and the couple moved to Princeton University prior to the start of the Second World War, and moved to Zurich in 1951. Lutz's main areas of study were credit theory, economic development theory and labour economics. Vera and Friedrich's 1951 work Theory of Investment of the Firm was said to have "greatly influenced modern capital theory, and would remain a major source of reference for the next decade".
Go to Profile#4997
James Harvey Rogers
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
James Harvey Rogers was Yale University Sterling Professor of Economics from 1931 until his death in 1939. He was an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on monetary economics from 1933 to 1934. He was a student of Irving Fisher and Vilfredo Pareto and is considered Fisher's closest disciple and a proto-Keynesian.
Go to Profile#4998
Ferdynand Zweig
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Ferdynand Zweig was a Polish sociologist and economist noted for his studies of the British working classes. Life in Poland Zweig was born in 1896 in the Polish city of Krakow into a middle-class Jewish family. He studied at the Universities of Krakow and Vienna, took a Doctor of Law degree, and taught economics in Poland in the 1930s, eventually being appointed to the Chair of Political Economy at the University of Krakow. He and his family escaped the country during the German occupation in 1939, fleeing through Romania, France and the Soviet Union, but one daughter was captured in France a...
Go to Profile#4999
Edward H. Litchfield
1914 - 1968 (54 years)
Edward Harold Litchfield was an American educator and the twelfth Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh. He is best known for a major expansion of the university, but also a failure to raise sufficient capital to fund such growth, eventually leading to his resignation in July 1965.
Go to Profile#5000
Isaiah Leo Sharfman
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Isaiah Leo Sharfman was an American economist. He was a professor at the University of Michigan from 1914 to 1955 and served as the president of the American Economic Association in 1945. Early life and education Sharfman was born into a Jewish family in the Russian Empire and came to the United States in 1894. He attended Boston Latin School and Harvard University, graduating with an B. A. in 1907 and LL.B. in 1910. He was an assistant in economics at Harvard College while studying for his degree in law.
Go to Profile