American political scientist (1916–2001)
Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American scholar whose work influenced the fields of computer science , economics , and cognitive psychology . His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality " and "satisficing ".[ 6] [ 7] He received the Turing Award in 1975 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978.[ 8] [ 9] His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature, spanning the fields of cognitive science , computer science , public administration , management , and political science .[ 10] He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001,[ 11] where he helped found the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science , one of the first such departments in the world.
Notably, Simon was among the pioneers of several modern-day scientific domains such as artificial intelligence , information processing , decision-making , problem-solving , organization theory , and complex systems . He was among the earliest to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions.[ 12] [ 13]
^ Herbert Simon, "Autobiography" , in Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969–1980 , Editor Assar Lindbeck, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1992.
^ Forest, Joelle, "John R. Commons and Herbert A. Simon on the Concept of Rationality", Journal of Economic Issues Vol. XXXV, 3 (2001), pp. 591–605
^ "Herbert Alexander Simon" . AI Genealogy Project. Archived from the original on April 30, 2012. Retrieved March 15, 2012 .
^ https://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~dbree/fullcv.pdf .
^ "Dorothea Simon Obituary - Pittsburgh, PA - Post-Gazette.com" . Post-Gazette.com . Retrieved August 8, 2015 .
^ "Guru: Herbert Simon" . The Economist . March 20, 2009. Retrieved February 13, 2018 .
^ Artinger, Florian M.; Gigerenzer, Gerd; Jacobs, Perke (2022). "Satisficing: Integrating Two Traditions" . Journal of Economic Literature . 60 (2): 598–635. doi :10.1257/jel.20201396 . hdl :21.11116/0000-0007-5C2A-4 . ISSN 0022-0515 . S2CID 249320959 .
^ Heyck, Hunter. "Herbert A. Simon - A.M. Turing Award Laureate" . amturing.acm.org .
^ "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1978" . NobelPrize.org .
^ Edward Feigenbaum (2001). "Herbert A. Simon, 1916-2001". Science . 291 (5511): 2107. doi :10.1126/science.1060171 . S2CID 180480666 . Studies and models of decision-making are the themes that unify most of Simon's contributions.
^ Simon, Herbert A. (1978). Assar Lindbeck (ed.). Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969–1980 . Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co. Retrieved May 22, 2012 .
^ 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