Herbert A. Simon

Herbert Alexander "Herb" Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American economist, political scientist and cognitive psychologist. He was best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in 1975. Simon is the first person to win both a Turing Award and a Nobel Prize.

Career
Simon was an important person in several modern-day scientific works such as artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems. He was one of the first people to analyze the architecture of preferential attachment.Simon, H. A., 1955, Biometrika 42, 425.B. Mandelbrot, "A Note on a Class of Skew Distribution Functions, Analysis and Critique of a Paper by H. Simon", Information and Control, 2 (1959), p. 90

He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001, where he helped found the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, one of the first such departments in the world.

Simon received many top-level honors in life, including becoming a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1959.American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2012 Book of Members/ChapterS, amacad.org He was elected as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1967.National Academy of Sciences. Nas.nasonline.org. Retrieved on September 23, 2013. 

Personal life
Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 15, 1916.Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America by Hunter Crowther-Heyck, (JHU 2005), page 25. He studied at the University of Chicago where he earned his BA and PhD degrees.

Simon married Dorothea Pye in 1938. Their marriage lasted 63 years until his death. They had three children.

In January 2001, Simon had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in his abdomen. He later died from problems caused by surgery on February 9, 2001 at the age of 84.

More readings

 Courtois, P.J., 1977. Decomposability: queueing and computer system applications. New York: Academic Press. Courtois was influenced by the work of Simon and Albert Ando on hierarchical nearly-decomposable systems in economic modelling as a criterion for computer systems design, and in this book he presents the mathematical theory of these nearly-decomposable systems in more detail than Simon and Ando do in their original papers.
 Frantz, R., and Marsh, L. (Eds.) (2016). Minds, Models and Milieux: Commemorating the Centennial of the Birth of Herbert Simon. Palgrave Macmillan.

References

Other websites


 A Tribute to Herbert A. Simon
 Full-text digital archive of Herbert Simon papers
 Mind Models online Artificial Intelligence exhibit
 pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations
 History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science  BOOK VIII: Herbert Simon, Paul Thagard and Others on Discovery Systems – with free downloads for public use.


Category:1916 births
Category:2001 deaths
Category:Turing Award winners
Category:American economists
Category:American political scientists
Category:American psychologists
Category:Scientists from Milwaukee
Category:Deaths from surgical complications
Category:Deaths from stomach cancer
Category:Nobel Prize in Economics winners