Herbert Simon

Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist specialized in the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, and philosophy of science and a professor, most notably, at Carnegie Mellon University. With almost a thousand, often very highly cited publications, he is one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century.

Simon was not only a polymath, but a truly innovative thinker. He was among the founding fathers of several of today's most important scientific domains, including Artificial Intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, attention economics, organization theory, complex systems, and computer simulation of scientific discovery. He coined the terms bounded rationality and satisficing, and was the first to analyse the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain power law distributions.

Simon's genius and influence is evidenced by the many top-level honors he received later in life. These include: the ACM's Turing Award for making "basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing." (1975); the Nobel Memorial Prize "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" (1978); the National Medal of Science (1986); and the APA's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (1993).