We present a concise summary of the personal and professional life of Herbert Alexander Simon

A Newell

AD Groot De

AM Hinz

HA Simon

K. Vela Velupillai

KV Velupillai

Ragupathy Venkatachalam

Abstract
We present a concise summary of the personal and professional life of Herbert Alexander Simon.</jats:p

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Computational Economics

Herbert Alexander Simon: 15th June, 1916–9th February, 2001 A Life

Velupillai, Kumaraswamy

Venkatachalam, Ragupathy

Goldsmiths Research Online

Comput Econhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s10614-018-9811-zHerbert Alexander Simon: 15th June, 1916–9thFebruary, 2001 A LifeK. Vela Velupillai1 · Ragupathy Venkatachalam2Accepted: 3 April 2018© The Author(s) 2018Abstract We present a concise summary of the personal and professional life ofHerbert Alexander Simon.Keywords Herbert Simon · Bounded rationality · Satisficing · Behaviouraleconomics · HeuristicsThe bare-bones of the logistics of the personal life of Herbert Alexander Simon are asfollows. He was born on the 15th of June, 1916, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and died onthe 9th of February, 2001, in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. His Parents were Arthur Simon(born 21st May in Ebersheim, Germany and emigrated to Milwaukee in 1903) andEdna Maguerite, née Merkel (born on 20th January, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri). Hewas Jewish on his Father’s side and (partly) Lutheran, Jewish and Catholic, on hisMother’s side. He described himself as an atheist.The only sibling was an elder brother, Clarence Joseph, who was 5 years older.Herbert Simon married Dorothea Pye, on Christmas day, in 1937 (Simon, op.cit,p. 66); she died in 2002. They had three children: Katherine, Peter and Barbara.We are indebted to Models of My Life, by Simon (1996), for most of the details in this essay, but also tothe various biographies of Simon by Velupillai (cf., for example, Models of Simon, Velupillai 2018,especially chapter 2 and appendix 3).B Ragupathy Venkatachalamrvenk001@gold.ac.uk1 Solna, Sweden2 Institute of Management Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE146NW, UK123K. V. Velupillai, R. VenkatachalamSimon’s ‘higher’ education, both as an undergraduate (B.A. in 1936) and graduatestudent (Ph.D. in 1943, in Political Science), was at the University of Chicago and heacknowledges that the main influences, as teachers, were Nicholas Rashevsky, HenrySchulz and Rudolf Carnap (although there were others under whom he studied).His professional academic career, if we are to summarise it concisely, was largely(1949–2001) spent at what was then Carnegie Tech., which later—became CarnegieMellon University, where he was Richard King Mellon Professor (till death); but therewere shorter spells at the Illinois Institute of Technology (he was, at IIT, a Professorof Political Science and also department chairman), UC-Berkeley and the CowlesCommission (when it was located in Chicago).His ‘life-long’ collaborator and friend, Allen Newell thought Simon ‘had puttogether the central idea’, of all his research, viz., bounded rationality, ‘at least 40 yearsago’—i.e., 1939 (Newell 1989, p. 400). This ‘central idea’, together with ‘satisficing’(Simon 1957, p. 204), were the two fulcra on which Cognitive agents, computation-ally constrained, as Information Processing Systems (IPS), heuristically searchingthrough a vast space of possibilities, tackled Human Problem Solving (HPS) issues ofDiscovery, Causality, Evolution, Identification, Learning and much else.Almost all of this research is encapsulated in the numerous ‘Models’ books hewrote, collecting many of his separate essays, lectures and Prize talks. There was, inaddition, Administrative Behavior (six editions, from 1947), Organizations (jointlywith James March—two editions) and his Raffaele Mattioli Lectures of 1993 (Simon1997), on An Empirically Based Microeconomics.The essays and chapters in these—and other—volumes are a testimony to Newell’spithy characterization of Herbert Simon’s professional research record. However, nei-ther bounded rationality, nor satisficing, ‘emerged’ from a vacuum; they solidifiedgradually.We are convinced that boundedly rational agents, satisficing (not optimising), wereculled from Simon’s affectionate and serious study of De Groot (19781—but the muchearlier Dutch edition of 1946). This underpins Simon’s analogical, computational andmetaphorical studies of Chess, the Tower of Hanoi (Hinz et al. 2013) and Cryptarith-metic (Newell and Simon 1972, especially part 2, chapters 4, 5 & 6)—which he calledthe Sweet Peas, E-coli and Drosophila of cognitive science—to obtain clues, and learnlessons of, and for, Human Problem Solving by Information Processing Agents.2Herbert Simon was the recipient of many prestigious prizes. However, we singleout two as deserving praise, and of them he was justly proud: The ACM Turing Awardof 1975 (which he shared with Allen Newell) and the Swedish Riksbankens Award inMemory of Alfred Nobel—also known, somewhat inaccurately, as the Nobel Prize inEconomics—of 1978.We do not think it is an exaggeration to claim that Herbert Simon was the ‘father’ of(Cognitive) Behavioural Economics; but in developing the computable basis for Infor-1 Simon learned the Dutch language to read the book; he later learned enough of the Swedish (for example,Simon 1996, p. 323) and Japanese languages to be able—at least—to lecture in them tolerably well!2 We maintain, with textual substantiation, that Simon’s IPA’s are implemented by the same digital com-putable rules of Alan Turing and the analogical computable precepts of Claude Shannon (none of whichdepend on the validity of the so-called Church-Turing Thesis).123Herbert Alexander Simon: 15th June, 1916–9th February, 2001…mation Processing Systems, searching vast spaces, naturally constrained by boundedlyrational agents, satisficing in the logic of decision-making, he was able to free theframework of Human Problem Solving from reliance on the Church-Turing Thesis;nor was the logic of decision-making that Simon subscribed to, orthodox mathematicallogic (Simon 1996).Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Interna-tional License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution,and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and thesource, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.ReferencesDe Groot, A. D. (1978). Thought and choice in chess (2nd ed.). The Hague: Mouton Publishers.Hinz, A. M., Klavžar, S., Milutinovic´, U., & Petr, C. (2013). The tower of Hanoi—Myths and maths. NewYork, NY: Birkhäuser.Newell, A. (1989). Putting it all together, chapter 15. In D. Klahr & K. Kotovsky (Eds.), Complex informationprocessing—The impact of Herbert Simon (pp. 399–440). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human problem solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc.Simon, H. A. (1957). Models of man—Social and rational. New York: Wiley.Simon, H. A. (1996). Models of my life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Simon, H. A. (1997). An empirically based microeconomics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Velupillai, K. V. (2018). Models of Simon. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.123

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Herbert Alexander Simon: 15th June, 1916–9th February, 2001 A Life

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