Herbert A. Simon

Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American thinker whose research reshaped computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. He focused on how people and organizations make decisions, and he is most famous for developing the ideas of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing." In 1975, he and Allen Newell won the ACM Turing Award, and three years later he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Simon’s work was notably interdisciplinary, covering cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science. He spent nearly his entire career at Carnegie Mellon University, from 1949 until his death in 2001, and helped establish the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science—one of the first such departments anywhere.

He was an early pioneer in artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems. Simon was among the first to study the architecture of complexity and to suggest a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916, Simon was the son of Arthur Simon, a Jewish electrical engineer and patent attorney who emigrated from Germany, and Edna Marguerite Merkel, a pianist with Jewish, Lutheran, and Catholic ancestry from Central Europe. His European forebears included piano makers, goldsmiths, and vintners.

Simon attended Milwaukee public schools, where he developed a passion for science and identified as an atheist. In middle school, he wrote a letter defending atheists’ civil liberties to the Milwaukee Journal. His family encouraged the idea that human behavior could be studied scientifically; his uncle Harold Merkel, an economics student of John R. Commons, was an early influence. Through Harold’s books, Simon discovered social science. He also cited Norman Angell’s *The Great Illusion* and Henry George’s *Progress and Poverty* as formative works. In high school, he joined the debate team and argued for George’s single tax out of conviction.

In 1933, Simon entered the University of Chicago, planning to study social science and mathematics. He considered biology but avoided it due to color-blindness and clumsiness in the lab. At university, he focused on political science and economics. His key mentor was econometrician Henry Schultz. Simon earned his B.A. in 1936 and his Ph.D. in 1943, both in political science from Chicago, studying under Harold Lasswell, Nicolas Rashevsky, Rudolf Carnap, Henry Schultz, and Charles Edward Merriam. After a course on municipal government measurement, he became a research assistant to Clarence Ridley, co-authoring *Measuring Municipal Activities* in 1938. This work led him to organizational decision-making, his dissertation topic.

After graduating, Simon took a research assistantship in municipal administration that became the directorship of an operations research group at UC Berkeley from 1939 to 1942. He completed his doctoral exams by mail and worked on his dissertation after hours. From 1942 to 1949, he taught political science at the Illinois Institute of Technology, also serving as department chair. There, he attended seminars by the Cowles Commission, including Trygve Haavelmo, Jacob Marschak, and Tjalling Koopmans, deepening his study of institutional economics. Marschak recruited Simon to help study the economic effects of atomic energy.

In 1949, Simon joined Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon) as a professor of administration and chair of Industrial Management. He remained there until 2001, also teaching psychology and computer science, occasionally visiting other universities.

Seeking a more realistic alternative to classical economic models, Simon became known for his theory of corporate decision-making in *Administrative Behavior*, which recognized multiple factors influencing decisions. His interest in organization and administration led him to serve three times as a department chair and to help create the Economic Cooperation Administration in 1948, which administered Marshall Plan aid. He also served on President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee.