Herbert A. Simon

Herbert Simon grew up in Milwaukee, the son of a German-Jewish immigrant engineer and a mother whose family mixed Jewish, Lutheran, and Catholic ancestry. An uncle's old college textbooks on economics, left behind in the house, gave him an early taste for the subject before he ever took a class in it. At the University of Chicago he studied under the philosopher Rudolf Carnap, the political scientist Harold Lasswell, and the economist Henry Schultz, and grew convinced that economic theory's tidy rational actor, who weighs every option and picks the best one, described nobody he had actually met. He finished his doctorate in political science in 1943, at 27.

Simon's 1947 book Administrative Behavior argued that real decision-makers do not optimize, they satisfice, stopping at the first option that is good enough given the time and information they actually have, a concept he called bounded rationality. At Carnegie Mellon from 1949 on, he turned that idea toward machines; with Allen Newell he built the Logic Theorist in 1956 and the General Problem Solver in 1957, programs that mechanized step-by-step reasoning and helped found the field of artificial intelligence. He and Newell shared the Turing Award in 1975 for that work. In 1978 Simon alone won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, cited for pioneering research into how organizations actually make decisions, not the idealized ones economic models had assumed for two centuries.

Simon's own confidence sometimes ran well past what his theory should have allowed. In a 1957 address he predicted that within 10 years a digital computer would be the world chess champion, unless barred from competition, at a time when his own chess program had never finished a tournament game. No computer beat a reigning champion until Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997, 30 years late. He defended the prediction for the rest of his life, comparing it to Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of human flight. It was an odd blind spot for a man whose central insight was that real decision-makers, including apparently himself, settle for good enough rather than getting it exactly right.

Simon died on February 9, 2001, in Pittsburgh, three weeks after surgery for abdominal cancer, at 84. Behavioral economics, built partly on his insight that people are not perfect optimizers, became one of the field's most active branches in the following two decades, and Daniel Kahneman's own 2002 Nobel Prize traced its lineage back to Simon's 1978 award. The computer science department he helped found at Carnegie Mellon in the 1950s, when computing barely existed as an academic subject, now ranks among the best in the world. Satisficing and bounded rationality escaped academic journals altogether and became ordinary vocabulary in management and political science, an unusually wide afterlife for a term coined by one economist.

Herbert A. Simon's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Administrative Behavior book
  Argued organizations satisfice rather than optimize; the basis of his Nobel 1947
• The Logic Theorist invention
  Built with Allen Newell; often called the first AI program 1956
• The General Problem Solver invention
  A general-purpose program modeling human problem-solving 1957
• Models of Man book
  Collected papers formalizing bounded rationality 1957
• Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences other
  For research into decision-making within economic organizations 1978

• June 15, 1916 aged 0 Born in Milwaukee
• 1936 aged ~20 Earns a BA from the University of Chicago
• 1943 aged ~27 Completes a PhD in political science at Chicago
• 1947 aged ~31 Publishes Administrative Behavior
• 1949 aged ~33 Joins Carnegie Mellon and helps build its computer science program
• 1956 aged ~40 Builds the Logic Theorist with Allen Newell
• 1957 aged ~41 Predicts a computer will be world chess champion within 10 years
• 1978 aged ~62 Wins the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
• February 9, 2001 aged 84 Dies in Pittsburgh

• John von Neumann 1903–1957
  Hungarian-American mathematician and engineer whose computer architecture remains the basis of modern computing. opposed
• Milton Friedman 1912–2006
  Nobel Prize-winning economist whose free-market ideas profoundly influenced American economic policy. rival
• Daniel Kahneman 1934–2024
  Israeli-American psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on behavioral economics and decision-making. influenced
• John McCarthy 1927–2011
  Coined the term artificial intelligence and created the Lisp programming language. collaborator