List of Famous people named William

Sir William Paterson was a Scottish trader and banker. He was one of the founders of the Bank of England and was one of the main proponents of the catastrophic Darien scheme. Later he became an advocate of Union with England.

William Dougal Christie was a British diplomat, politician and man of letters.

William of Moerbeke, O.P., was a prolific medieval translator of philosophical, medical, and scientific texts from Greek language into Latin, enabled by the period of Latin rule of the Byzantine Empire. His translations were influential in his day, when few competing translations were available, and are still respected by modern scholars.

William Collum is a Scottish football referee.

William So Wing Hong is a Hong Kong actor and a Cantopop singer. He began his musical career by participating the New Talent Singing Awards in 1985 and won the competition as the first runner up to Alex To. His performance at that event earned him a record contract with Capital Artists, with which he released an EP. 1998 was the peak year for William So with his hit song Kiss More, Sad More, which is also the theme song for the popular TV Series Healing Hands.

William Laud was a clergyman in the Church of England, appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Charles I in 1633. A key advocate of Charles's religious reforms, he was arrested by Parliament in 1640, and executed towards the end of the First English Civil War in January 1645.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton MRIA was an Irish mathematician, Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. He worked in both pure mathematics and mathematics for physics. He made important contributions to optics, classical mechanics and algebra. Although Hamilton was not a physicist–he regarded himself as a pure mathematician–his work was of major importance to physics, particularly his reformulation of Newtonian mechanics, now called Hamiltonian mechanics. This work has proven central to the modern study of classical field theories such as electromagnetism, and to the development of quantum mechanics. In pure mathematics, he is best known as the inventor of quaternions.

William Thomas Francis Miller is an actor and singer. Of U.S. and British parentage, he has lived in the UK, the United States and mainly in Spain.

William Atherton Knight is an American actor, best known for portraying Richard Thornburg in Die Hard and its sequel and Walter Peck in Ghostbusters.

William Lok is a Hong Kong racing driver currently competing in the FIA World Touring Car Championship for Campos Racing.