List of Famous people named William

William Jacobus vanden Heuvel was an American attorney, businessman, and author, as well as a diplomat. He was known for advising Robert F. Kennedy during the latter's campaigns for Senate in 1964 and president in 1968. Vanden Heuvel established the Roosevelt Institute in 1987. He was the father of Katrina vanden Heuvel, longtime editor of The Nation magazine, and Wendy vanden Heuvel, children from his marriage to author/editor Jean Stein, the daughter of MCA founder Jules C. Stein.

William Francis Melchert-Dinkel is an American former licensed practical nurse who was convicted in 2011 of encouraging people to die by suicide. He allegedly told those contemplating suicide what methods worked best, that it was an acceptable choice to take their own life, that they would be better off in heaven, and/or falsely entered into suicide pacts with them. He is a married father of two.

William Oughtred was an English mathematician and Anglican clergyman. After John Napier invented logarithms and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales upon which slide rules are based, Oughtred was the first to use two such scales sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and division. He is credited with inventing the slide rule in about 1622. He also introduced the "×" symbol for multiplication and the abbreviations "sin" and "cos" for the sine and cosine functions.

William MacAskill is a Scottish philosopher, ethicist, and one of the originators of the effective altruism movement. He is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, a researcher at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford and Director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research.

William D. Swenson is a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army who was awarded the Medal of Honor in a ceremony on October 15, 2013. He was the sixth living recipient in the War on Terror. Swenson, Thomas Payne and Matthew O. Williams are the only Medal of Honor recipients still on active duty.

William Alfred Newsom III was an American state appeals court judge, administrator of the Getty family trust, and the father of Governor of California Gavin Newsom.

William Bainbridge was a Commodore in the United States Navy. During his long career in the young American Navy he served under six presidents beginning with John Adams and is notable for his many victories at sea. He commanded several famous naval ships, including USS Constitution, and saw service in the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812. Bainbridge was also in command of USS Philadelphia when she grounded off the shores of Tripoli in North Africa, resulting in his capture and imprisonment for many months. In the latter part of his career he became the U.S. Naval Commissioner.

William Charles Powers Jr. was an American attorney, academic, and university administrator who served as the 28th president of the University of Texas at Austin, becoming the second-longest serving president in the university's history. He held the position from February 1, 2006, to July 2, 2015, when he was succeeded by Gregory L. Fenves. Before his death, Powers held the Hines H. Baker and Thelma Kelley Baker Chair at the University of Texas School of Law.

William Albert "Bill" Chaney was an American historian of Anglo-Saxon England who spent his career, from 1952 until his death, teaching at Lawrence University. At various times, he held the George McKendree Steele endowed chair (1962–99) and the chair of the history department (1968–71).

William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong was an English engineer and industrialist who founded the Armstrong Whitworth manufacturing concern on Tyneside. He was also an eminent scientist, inventor and philanthropist. In collaboration with the architect Richard Norman Shaw, he built Cragside in Northumberland, the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectricity. He is regarded as the inventor of modern artillery.