An engineer’s son in Milwaukee
Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916. His father, Arthur Simon, was a Jewish electrical engineer who had come to the United States from Germany in 1903 after earning his diploma at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt. Arthur designed electrical control equipment, later became a patent attorney, and was honoured by Marquette University for his civic work. Herbert’s mother, Edna Merkel, was an accomplished pianist and a third-generation American whose forebears had emigrated from Prague and Cologne after 1848. In his Nobel autobiography Simon noted that among his ancestors the Merkels in Cologne were Lutherans, while the Goldschmidts in Prague and the Simons were Jews.
The house was full of books, music and argument; dinner, he recalled, was a place for discussion and debate, often political and sometimes scientific. An uncle, Harold Merkel, who had studied economics at the University of Wisconsin and died young, left behind books on economics and psychology that introduced the boy to the idea that human behaviour could be studied scientifically. On the high school debating team Simon defended free trade, disarmament and Henry George’s single tax on land, reading economics to win his arguments.
A mathematical social scientist
Simon entered the University of Chicago in 1933 with a clear goal: the social sciences, he believed, needed the same rigour and mathematical foundations that had made physics so successful. Colour blindness and clumsiness in the laboratory steered him away from biology. He studied with the econometrician Henry Schultz, the philosopher Rudolf Carnap, the mathematical biophysicist Nicolas Rashevsky and the political scientists Harold Lasswell and Charles Merriam, and taught himself graduate-level physics on the side. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1936.
A term paper on how a city organisation made decisions led to a research job in municipal administration and then, from 1939 to 1942, to directing a research group at the University of California, Berkeley. He took his doctoral exams by mail and wrote his dissertation on administrative decision-making in his spare time, receiving his PhD from Chicago in 1943. On Christmas Day 1937 he married Dorothea Pye, later his co-author in both public administration and psychology; the marriage lasted until his death.
Bounded rationality
Simon’s dissertation became Administrative Behavior (1947), the foundation of his life’s work. Classical economics pictured a perfectly rational “economic man” who knows every alternative and every consequence and always picks the best. Simon pointed out that no real person or organisation can do this. Information is incomplete, the future is uncertain and the human mind can process only so much. Real decision makers are rational within limits, a condition he called bounded rationality, and instead of searching for the perfect choice they look for one that is good enough, a strategy he named “satisficing”.
The idea sounds modest but it changed how organisations are studied and designed. If people cannot know everything, then the structure of an organisation, who gathers which information, who decides what and which routines they follow, shapes the decisions as much as anyone’s intelligence. With James March he wrote Organizations (1958), a founding text of modern organisation theory. In 1978 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded him the prize in economic sciences for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organisations. Bounded rationality is now a central theme of behavioural economics, which studies how real people save, borrow, insure and choose.
Building a new kind of business school
From 1942 to 1949 Simon taught political science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and joined the seminars of the Cowles Commission, a hothouse of mathematical economics. There he helped study the possible economic effects of atomic energy and, with David Hawkins, proved the Hawkins–Simon theorem, which gives the conditions under which an input-output model of an economy has a sensible, positive solution. In 1948 he helped set up the Economic Cooperation Administration, the agency that ran Marshall Plan aid to Europe.
In 1949 he moved to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, later Carnegie Mellon University, to help create a Graduate School of Industrial Administration built on economics and behavioural science. He stayed for the rest of his life. With Charles Holt, Franco Modigliani and John Muth he developed mathematical rules for controlling inventories and smoothing production, early tools of management science, and he served on the President’s Science Advisory Committee from 1968 to 1972.
Teaching machines to think
In 1952, at the RAND Corporation, Simon met Allen Newell, and around 1954 the two concluded that the best way to understand human problem-solving was to simulate it on a computer. With the programmer Cliff Shaw they built the Logic Theorist, completed in 1956, the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning. It proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in a chapter of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, finding a shorter proof for one of them. Before it ran on a computer, Simon tested it by handing his wife, his three children and some graduate students cards with steps of the program and having them act it out.
To write such programs the team invented list-processing languages, the IPL series, whose linked lists became a basic tool of computing. They followed with the General Problem Solver (1957), which separated general problem-solving strategy from knowledge about particular problems. Their method, heuristic search, narrows a vast space of possibilities using rules of thumb, much as people do. In 1975 Simon and Newell shared the Turing Award, computing’s highest honour, for basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition and list processing. Simon was also candid in hindsight about over-optimism: in 1957 he predicted a computer would beat the world chess champion within ten years, a feat that took about forty.
How the mind becomes expert
Simon spent much of his later career using computers to model human thought. With Edward Feigenbaum he developed EPAM, one of the first theories of learning implemented as a computer program, and with Newell he wrote Human Problem Solving (1972), which used “production rules” to model thinking and laid groundwork for the expert systems later used in medicine and industry. With William Chase he studied chess masters and showed that expertise rests on recognising thousands of familiar patterns, or “chunks”, built up over about a decade of practice. With Anders Ericsson he developed the method of asking people to think aloud while solving problems, a technique still widely used in psychology and in usability research.
His research also reached the classroom. In a 2000 paper with John Anderson and Lynne Reder he argued from the evidence on expertise that practice is essential to real competence, and that the teacher’s task is not to avoid practice but to make it engaging, an argument that influenced John Mighton’s widely used mathematics programme for schoolchildren.
Jewish roots and independent convictions
Simon’s father was Jewish, and his mother’s ancestry was a mix of Jewish, Lutheran and Catholic families from Central Europe. He did not practise a religion: as a schoolboy he already considered himself an atheist, and in middle school he wrote to the Milwaukee Journal defending the civil liberties of atheists. He is counted among the Jewish Nobel laureates on the strength of his family background.
He held strong views and argued them openly. He remained a supporter of Henry George’s idea of taxing land values rather than wages, arguing for it again in 1979, and he spent decades criticising economists for building theories on assumptions about rationality that psychology showed to be false. His two guiding principles in science policy, he wrote, were to make the social sciences more rigorous and to bring natural and social scientists together on complex questions of public policy.
The man and his later years
Simon was a pianist, a keen mountain climber and a voracious reader, and his range was so wide that he once taught an undergraduate course on the French Revolution. He wrote 27 books and close to a thousand papers, and as of 2016 he was, by Google Scholar’s count, the most cited person in both artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. Among his many honours were the National Medal of Science in 1986 and the American Psychological Association’s award for lifetime contributions to psychology. His autobiography, Models of My Life, appeared in 1991.
He kept teaching and doing research until his final illness. In January 2001 he underwent surgery in Pittsburgh to remove a cancerous tumour; he died of complications on February 9, 2001, aged 84. He was survived by Dorothea, their children Katherine, Peter and Barbara, and grandchildren; Dorothea died the following year.
Legacy
Few scholars have shaped so many fields. Managers who design decision procedures, economists who study how real people choose, psychologists who model memory and expertise, and computer scientists who build programs that search, plan and reason all work with ideas Simon helped originate. At Carnegie Mellon he, Newell and Alan Perlis built one of the world’s first and strongest centres of computer science.
His central message was humane as well as scientific: people are not calculating machines, and institutions work best when they are designed for minds that are intelligent but limited. That insight runs from the organisation charts of governments and companies to the artificial intelligence systems of today.
Sources & further reading
Herbert A. Simon, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Herbert A. Simon, IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneers · In Memoriam: Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001), Association for Psychological Science · Logic Theorist, Wikipedia · Herbert A. Simon, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.