Herbert Simon

Origins and early life

Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee on 15 June 1916, the son of Edna Merkel, a pianist, and of Arthur Simon, an electrical engineer and inventor who had come from Germany in 1903.

Work and career

In his Nobel autobiography he named his forebears: the Simons of Ebersheim and the Goldschmidts of Prague were Jews, the Merkels of Cologne Lutherans, so he was Jewish on his father's side and partly on his mother's, though from high school on he called himself an atheist. An uncle who had studied economics led him to the social sciences, and he entered the University of Chicago in 1933 resolved to give them the rigour of the hard sciences.

He graduated in 1936, married Dorothea Pye on Christmas Day 1937, and ran a research group at Berkeley from 1939 to 1942 while taking his doctoral examinations by mail. His doctorate of 1943 dealt with administrative decision-making, the subject of his book Administrative Behavior in 1947, and he became best known for bounded rationality and satisficing, aiming for good enough rather than the best. In 1949 he moved to Pittsburgh to help build a new Graduate School of Industrial Administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, his home for the rest of his life.

With Allen Newell, met at the RAND Corporation in 1952, he set out to simulate problem-solving by computer, and their Logic Theory Machine of 1956 and General Problem Solver of 1957 made them pioneers of artificial intelligence.

Recognition

He and Newell shared the Turing Award in 1975, and in 1978 he received, alone, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, “for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations”.

Later years

He also taught psychology and computer science at what became Carnegie Mellon University, where he helped found one of the first schools of computer science, and died in Pittsburgh on 9 February 2001.