Herbert A. Simon

Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, psychologist, and computer scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science, sociology, and political science, unified by studies of decision-making. Simon was among the pioneers of several of today's important scientific domains, including artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, complex systems, and computer simulation of scientific discovery. He coined the terms bounded rationality and satisficing, and was among the earliest to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions. Simon received many top-level honors in life, including the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 and the Turing Award in 1975. He also received honorary degrees from various universities, such as from Harvard University. As of 2016, Simon was the most cited person in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Psychology on Google Scholar. With almost a thousand highly cited publications, he was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. For many years he held the post of Richard King Mellon Professor at Carnegie Mellon University As a testament to his interdisciplinary approach, Simon was affiliated with such varied Carnegie Mellon departments as the School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, departments of Philosophy, Social and Decision Sciences, and Psychology. 2Early life and education Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 15, 1916. His father, Arthur Simon (1881–1948), was an electrical engineer who had come to the United States from Germany in 1903 after earning his engineering degree from the Technische Hochschule of Darmstad