1916–2001 · political scientist, economist, psychologist, computer scientist

here are few people who did foundational work in four fields. Herbert Simon did, and the thread through all of it was one question: how does a mind with limited capacity make decisions in a complicated world?

what he did

His first book, Administrative Behavior (Simon, 1947), studied how decisions are made inside organizations. In two papers in the 1950s, Simon (1955) and Simon (1956), he proposed replacing the all-knowing rational chooser of economics with one limited in knowledge and computation, who satisfices rather than optimizes [paraphrase, not a quotation].

At what is now Carnegie Mellon University, with Allen Newell and J. C. Shaw, he built the Logic Theorist, a program that proved theorems from Principia Mathematica (Newell & Simon, 1956), and then the General Problem Solver. These were among the first programs designed to model human reasoning, and with them Simon and Newell helped found both artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology as a science of information processing.

He and Newell received the Turing Award in 1975. Simon received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 for his work on decision-making in organizations.

why he is here

Simon is the hinge between this institute's subjects: he studied people, built machines to model them, and insisted that rational behavior depends on the fit between a mind and its environment. See bounded rationality.

Primary works and sources

1. Simon (1947). Administrative Behavior. New York: Macmillan.
2. Simon (1955). A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. doi:10.2307/1884852
3. Simon (1956). Rational choice and the structure of the environment. Psychological Review. doi:10.1037/h0042769
4. Newell & Simon (1956). The logic theory machine--A complex information processing system. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. doi:10.1109/TIT.1956.1056797

Try it yourself. [playful] Small toys on the toy shelf that show this in action:   • the four cards — the selection task

see also

	bounded rationality — his question, and what became of it
	Turing — who asked whether machines could think, six years before the Logic Theorist
	timeline: machines that answer — 1956