List of Famous people named William

William James Townley was an English football player and coach.

William Graham Sumner was a classical liberal American social scientist. He taught social sciences at Yale, where he held the nation's first professorship in sociology. He was one of the most influential teachers at Yale or any other major school. Sumner wrote widely within the social sciences, with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political theory, sociology, and anthropology. He supported laissez-faire economics, free markets, and the gold standard. He adopted the term "ethnocentrism" to identify the roots of imperialism, which he strongly opposed, and as a spokesman against it he was in favor of the "forgotten man" of the middle class, a term he coined. He had a long-term influence on conservatism in the United States.

William Henry O'Connell was an American cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Boston from 1907 until his death in 1944, and was made a cardinal in 1911.

William Bellinger Bulloch was an American Senator from Georgia, the youngest son of Archibald Bulloch, uncle to James Stephens Bulloch, granduncle to James Dunwoody Bulloch, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, and Irvine Stephens Bulloch, great-granduncle to President Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. and Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt, and great-great-granduncle to First Lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt.

William Mulholland was a self-taught Irish American civil engineer who was responsible for building the infrastructure to provide a water supply that allowed Los Angeles to grow into the largest city in California. As the head of a predecessor to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Mulholland designed and supervised the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 233-mile (375 km)-long system to move water from Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley. The creation and operation of the aqueduct led to the disputes known as the California Water Wars. In March 1928, Mulholland's career came to an end when the St. Francis Dam failed just over 12 hours after he and his assistant gave it a safety inspection.

William Chalmers was a Swedish merchant and freemason. He was born in Gothenburg in 1748 to the Scottish merchant, William Chalmers, Sr., and his Swedish wife, Inga Orre. William Chalmers Jr. was eldest amongst his brothers James, George Andreas and Charles Chalmers. He became a director of the Swedish East India Company and in 1783 he was appointed as their resident representative in Canton. He would stay there and in Macau for ten years before returning home. He died in Gothenburg in 1811 leaving half his fortune to the Sahlgrenska hospital, Gothenburg. After some other donations, the remainder was donated to create a crafting school for poor children, which in 1829 became a college, that today is named the Chalmers University of Technology.

William Lewis Sharkey was an American judge and politician from Mississippi.

William Hooper was an American lawyer, politician, and a member of the Continental Congress representing North Carolina from 1774 through 1777. Hooper was also a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence, along with fellow North Carolinians Joseph Hewes and John Penn.

William King, was an Anglo-Irish geologist at Queen's College Galway. He was the first to propose that the bones found in the German valley of Neanderthal in 1856 were not of Homo sapiens, but of a distinct species: Homo neanderthalensis. He proposed the name of this new species at a meeting of the British Association in 1863, with the written version published in 1864.

William Temple Hornaday, Sc.D. was an American zoologist, conservationist, taxidermist, and author. He served as the first director of the New York Zoological Park, known today as the Bronx Zoo, and he was a pioneer in the early wildlife conservation movement in the United States.