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Posted by AJ's Blog on July 18, 2017

14 HERBERT A. SIMON ARJANG A. ASSAD

In the early years of operations research (OR), the line between OR and mathematical economics was often blurred. Important and influential contributions to OR were being made by mathematical economists from the University of Chicago’s Cowles Commission for Research in Economics and the RAND Corporation. Herbert A. Simon, a social scientist whose research spanned social and economic systems, was first exposed to OR through the work of the Cowles Commission and RAND, as well as by his research projects at Carnegie Mellon University. Even as he advocated alternative approaches, he considered OR as a normative science of decision making. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations. He was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize from the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) for the renaissance-like character of his research program, and for specific research contributions in bounded rationality, production planning, artificial intelligence, and cognitive psychology. He authored and co-authored 27 books and close to 1,000 publications. Beyond his specific technical contributions, his influence on OR persists due to his lifelong interest in investigating decision making in administrative, social, biological, and computer-based systems.

EARLY YEARS: MILWAUKEE TO CHICAGO

Herbert (Herb) Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916. His father, Arthur Simon (1881–1948) was born in a village near Mainz, Germany. Several generations of the Simon family had been vintners and wine merchants in that region. After Arthur received his engineering diploma from the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt in 1902, he emigrated to Milwaukee in 1903. There he married Edna Merkel (born 1888), a second-generation descendant of German immigrants from Prague and Cologne. Her maternal grandfather was a salesman and a civil war veteran while her paternal grandfather was a piano builder. Edna was an accomplished pianist and a piano teacher until she married in 1910.

For most of his career, Arthur worked at the Cutler-Hammer Manufacturing Company, a producer of eletrical equipment. Although he practiced law as a patent attorney, he took great pride in his profession as an engineer. It was important to him to follow the scientific advances in engineering. As a designer of control gear (he patented a servomechanism in 1919), Arthur was ‘‘a significant contributor to the development of control devices’’ (Simon 1991, 108). His social circles included other engineers and professionals; he sometimes took Herb on plant tours organized by the Engineer’s Society. Arthur was also skilful at carpentry and gardening. His intellectual interests extended beyond engineering and he communicated to Herb an appreciation of broad cultural interests which was later reinforced by Herb’s University of Chicago education.

In addition to his parents, Herb’s household included his only sibling Clarence (5 years older) and his maternal grandparents. Two events put a strain on the family life. Arthur almost lost his job during the Great Depression and was forced to take a pay cut to keep it. Edna became a semi-invalid in 1936 requiring much care and attention. In spite of these events, Herb did not encounter any economic hardship as a child and enjoyed a happy, middle-class family life.

At school, Herb soon found out that ‘‘he was smarter than his classmates and that became important to him’’ (Simon 1991, 8). He mastered his courses with ease and developed the confidence to learn new subjects, often on his own. His older brother was not a close companion; at home, Herb was often alone, reading books, pursuing chess, or collecting insects or stamps. His interest in societal matters started early—in the fourth grade he drew up a school constitution and presented it to the principal, and wrote similar items for student clubs. In high school, his educational ‘‘interests were quite dispersed, although they were increasingly directed toward science,’’ of what sort, he was not sure (Simon 1978c). He expanded his social activities by joining student clubs (debate, science, Latin). He always loved the outdoors and, as a Boy Scout, took part in hiking, and camping trips. Thanks to his extensive readings in economics and the sciences in his high school years, Herb already had a notion that the social sciences could benefit from mathematical thinking in the same way as the physical sciences.

In September 1933, Herb started college at the University of Chicago, having won a $300 a year scholarship based on his scores in a competitive examination. Herb intended to pursue both social sciences and mathematics. By age 19, he had already broached what he called the central issue of his intellectual quest (he would call it his monomania): decision making (Simon 2001).

While Herb studied both economics and political science as an undergraduate, he majored in political science to avoid an accounting course required by the economics department. His college career was, to put it mildly, unconventional. Because of the excellent education he acquired in high school, he finished all the survey courses and some of the upper-division requirements in both the political and social sciences in less than 2 years. He preferred self-study and did not care to attend classes even when he was enrolled in a course—Herb took a French class that he almost never attended and stopped taking any more classes in mathematics when his sophomore calculus professor insisted that he attend class. Since then, all of Herb’s mathematical education was self-taught (Simon 1991, 40). In his third year, Herb was free to focus entirely on graduate courses.

At Chicago, Herb made two very close friends who greatly influenced his life and career—Harold Guetzkow and William (Bill) Cooper. Harold had grown up in Milwaukee less than a mile from Herb’s home, but they first met on the train to Chicago as they headed for college. While they followed different curricula at the University of Chicago, they kept a lively intellectual exchange about their mutual interests—it was Harold who got Herb interested in cognitive psychology while both were undergraduates (Simon 1997, xv). Bill Cooper, who lived in the same dormitory as Herb, often double-dated with Herb and, on one such occasion, Bill arranged a blind-date for Herb with Dorothea Pye. Dorothea was a graduate student in the political science department and was also the department’s secretary. Herb and Dorothea started to date regularly and were married on Christmas Day, 1937. In 1949, Bill persuaded Herb to join the Carnegie Institute of Technology faculty, and, in turn, Herb, convinced Harold to join Carnegie Tech in 1957.

Herb also took courses outside of political science from three professors who influenced him greatly: Henry Schultz, Nicholas Rashevsky, and Rudolf Carnap. Through the econometrician and mathematical economist Schultz, with whom Herb took graduate courses in economics, Herb learned about Walrasian equilibrium theory, the Neyman-Pearson theory of statistical inference, and the importance of the identification problem (a subject he was to work on himself). Schultz and Herb were both impressed by Alfred Lotka’s book, Elements of Physical Biology, and his use of mathematics to model biological systems (Lotka 1925). This led Herb to the mathematical biophysicist Rashevsky, who, inspired by Lotka’s work, created a new degree program in mathematical biology at the Chicago.

Herb was also drawn to philosophy of science courses offered by Rudolf Carnap. One of Carnap’s main interests was the logical structure of language. Herb embarked on a serious study of formal logic on his own and absorbed several key works of logic and logical positivism by the summer of 1937. This intensive study of logic had profound effects on Herb’s subsequent work (Crowther-Heyck 2005, 73). At one point, Herb had planned to write his dissertation on the logical structure of political science. Reflecting on these three teachers, Herb stated: ‘‘All three men communicated to me in their lectures something of how science—at least science involving the applications of mathematics—was taught’’ (Simon 1991, 53).

GRADUATE SCHOOL AND BEYOND

Chicago’s department of political science was the nation’s leader in 1936. It matched Harvard University as the top granter of Ph.D. degrees (separated by a large gap from third place Columbia University). The faculty included Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, and Harold Gosnell; its graduate roster included Gabriel Almond, V. O. Key, and David Truman. All of these individuals, joined by Herb, were to make a substantial impact on the field (Crowther-Heyck 2005, 41). An important characteristic of the department was its intellectual atmosphere that allowed students to pursue different interests in different disciplines. Another important connection was the department’s involvement in the city manager movement, which aimed for efficient, more business-like ways of running municipalities. According to one historian, ‘‘it is fair to call the University of Chicago the movement’s intellectual and institutional hub’’ (Crowther-Heyck 2005, 45).

A term paper Herb wrote in 1935 for an undergraduate course he was taking turned out to be significant in his future path. The paper was on the recreation programs offered by Milwaukee’s city government and directly led Herb, in 1936, to enroll in Clarence Ridley’s course on measuring municipal governments. Ridley was the director of the International City Managers’ Association (ICMA) and an adjunct professor in the political science department. ICMA offered instruction and services to city managers, prepared textbooks and training manuals, and offered correspondence courses. Its yearbook allowed city managers to compare their city’s statistics with others.

When Herb entered graduate school in September, 1936, Ridley offered Herb a half-time research assistantship (at $62.50 a month). Herb’s task was to support Ridley in a large project on municipal activities that he was managing. The work involved ‘‘carrying out investigations that would now be classified as operations research’’ in the measurement of public services (Simon 1978c). As a research assistant, Herb soon found himself spending more time on this project than on his courses. Although he was just 21 years old, Herb’s ICMA activities involved visits to and interactions with city managers around the country. More generally, the ICMA project exposed Herb to managerial issues in municipalities. By observing Ridley, Herb gained insights into how a professional organization could be led and effectively run. The project results appeared in a series of 13 articles in Public Management, starting with Ridley and Simon (1937a, b), giving Herb his first journal publications. Later, these articles were collected into the monograph, Measuring Municipal Activities (Ridley and Simon 1938).

In late Spring 1938, Herb, still a graduate student at Chicago, went to California in a temporary position to help on a municipal research project at the University of California (Berkeley) Bureau of Public Administration. The Bureau was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. With the project soon to close, Herb, on completion of his temporary assignment, returned to Chicago to continue his studies and pursuit of his Ph.D. But, in early 1939, the Foundation funded a 3-year extension of the Bureau’s project. Herb was invited to become director of the project, even though he had not completed his doctorate. Arranging for a leave from his studies, he accepted the Bureau’s offer. He and Dorothea set out for California by rail in August 1939. In a hotel room along the way, they were woken up at 2:00 a.m. to learn that Hitler had invaded Poland.

The Berkeley project involved three studies of an empirical and statistical nature. The goal was to shed light on effective municipal practices. The first study sought to determine how large a caseload to assign to social workers in the State relief administration. Herb called this ‘‘comparable in scope to the Hawthorne Studies… carried out in the Western Electric Company during the 1930s, and more systematically designed’’ (Simon 1991, 82). This study generated a massive amount of data that was processed using new IBM wired plug-board machines. Another study involved a theoretical examination of urban property taxes and led to Herb’s first publication in the economics literature (Simon 1943). Along with the Milwaukee recreation study, this research served as an early source of Herb’s ideas on bounded rationality. He found that his conclusions depended as much on the assumptions a human decision maker included in an analysis of a tax increase as on the neoclassical assumptions of economic rationality.

The period at Berkeley was satisfying to Herb intellectually and socially. He became friends with Ronald Shephard, a student of the economist Griffith Evans, and Kenneth May, who studied with the statistician Jerzy Neyman. From them, he learned much about economics and the theory of statistical inference. In addition to his project work, Herb had to worry about preparing for his doctoral examinations and the writing of a dissertation. He took a 3-month leave of absence from work to prepare for his examinations which he took by mail in 1940 and ‘‘moonlighted a dissertation’’ (Simon 1978c). In May 1942, he returned to Chicago to defend his dissertation ‘‘Administrative behavior: A study of decision-making processes in administrative organizations.’’ Herb’s graduate transcript listed only one course for which he received credit—a course on sports! Curiously, the instructor was Bill Cooper.

After Pearl Harbor, Herb wanted to enlist for combat service and, with his education and experience, he felt qualified to be a commissioned officer. A convoluted bureaucratic process eventually led to his being rejected due to his color blindness (Simon 1991, 90–91). He was left with the choice of training for a commission in a noncombat job or being eventually drafted as a private. As he was not keen on the former, he decided to stay out until called. The call was postponed mainly because of family responsibilities— Herb was married with two children. His draft noticed came just after the bombing of Hiroshima; he never served. ‘‘I would be lying if I said I was sorry to have missed that war; perhaps just a little guilty’’ (Simon 1991, 91).

ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, ADMINISTRATIVE BEHAVIOR, AND THE COWLES COMMISSION

When Herb was convinced that he would not join the military, he accepted an offer from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago, his first faculty position. Herb and his family returned to Chicago in the summer of 1942. Accompanying Herb and Dorothea was their daughter Katherine (Kathie), 3 months old at the time (Simon 1991, 93). Herb made rapid progress during his 7 years at IIT. By 1946, he was an associate professor earning $4600 per year. Despite his young age, he sought and secured the position of department chairman in 1946. After the publication of his first major book, Administrative Behavior (1947), he was promoted to full professor with a salary of $6000. On the personal front, Herb and Dorothea’s household increased to five, with Peter born in 1944 and Barbara in 1946.

The book, Administrative Behavior, was based on Herb’s dissertation and drew upon his previous work on municipalities with Ridley and the Berkeley project. Herb’s observations of resource allocation for municipal services convinced him that the decisions of local governments could not be explained with the neoclassical economic framework of the single decision maker optimizing a profit function. Instead, he stressed that ‘‘administrative theory must be concerned with the limits of rationality, and the manner in which organization affects these limits for the person making a decision’’ (Simon 1947, 241).

At IIT, Herb’s main assignment was teaching constitutional law to engineers. He taught two or three sections of this required course each semester. In the late 1940s, when Donald Smithburg and Victor Thompson joined the department, they and Herb co-authored Public Administration (Simon, Smithburg, and Thompson 1950)—an ambitious textbook that covered a wide spectrum of topics in greater detail than Herb’s Administrative Behavior.

Upon Herb’s return to Chicago, Bill Cooper suggested that he become involved with the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics. The Cowles Commission was the center of postwar research in mathematical economics and econometrics and Herb became a regular participant at its weekly seminars. At the time, the Cowles staff included Jacob Marschak, Tjalling Koopmans, Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Debreu, Leonid Hurwitz, and Lawrence Klein. Milton Friedman, Oscar Lange, and Franco Modigliani (Herb’s future colleague at Carnegie) also took part in the seminars. Herb’s association with Cowles and its staff left an important mark on his research trajectory and his professional associations. At Cowles, he ‘‘received his fourth education in economics’’ (Simon 1991, 102). Herb also believed that the greatest impact of his exposure to Cowles was to encourage him ‘‘to try to mathematize’’ his ‘‘previous research in organization theory and decision making’’ (Simon 1947, 4). This also fueled Herb’s interest in mathematical economics and econometrics.

At Cowles, Herb learned about the nascent capabilities of linear programming (LP) and Koopman’s wartime research on activity analysis (Simon 1991, 103). He participated in Marschak’s major project on the economic effects of atomic energy, and took charge of the macroeconomic components of the study for which he used activity analysis. Having learned of game theory before the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by von Neumann and Morgenstern (1994) was published, Herb spent his 1944 Christmas vacation reading it and published one of the first reviews of that book (Simon 1945). Herb also developed lifelong friendships with, and much affection for, Koopmans and Marschak. He dedicated his book, Reason in Human Affairs (Simon 1983) to the latter.

The mathematician Merrill Flood, through his ties with Cowles and RAND, invited Herb to consult for RAND starting in the summer of 1952. Herb’s main project at RAND was to study the organization of early warning stations for air defense. He spent several summers and the entire academic year 1960–1961 at RAND.

Herb’s intensive reading of the economics literature had already resulted in an early contribution to input–output economics, now known as the Hawkins–Simon theorem (Hawkins and Simon 1949), the significance of which is described by Paul Samuelson (2004). As a result of his participation in the Cowles Commission and consulting at RAND, Herb’s research increasingly turned to mathematical economics and OR in 1950–1955. Some of the research Herb conducted while at the Cowles Commission and RAND, and his early Carnegie period, is reflected in the first five chapters of his book, Models of Man: Social and Rational (Simon 1957). Another important consequence of Herb’s involvement with the Cowles Commission was his enhanced contact with (and visibility within) the mathematical economics community.

Along a different line, Herb pursued his interest in statistical distributions governing social or biological formations, which dated back to his dissatisfaction with the explanations provided for Zipf’s law in the 1930s. In 1952, he studied a family of skew distributions related to Yule’s distribution (Simon 1955b) and used these for distributions of business firms sizes, incomes, or cities by population. This resulted in stream of work reflected in his joint work with Charles Bonini and Yuji Ijiri (Ijiri and Simon 1964, 1977, Simon and Bonini 1958).

CARNEGIE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY: GRADUATE SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL ADMINISTRATION (GSIA)

Herb made his first visit to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1948 at the invitation of Bill Cooper who had joined its department of economics in 1947. In 1949, Carnegie received a $6 million endowment from William Larimer Mellon (founder of the Gulf Oil Company and Andrew’s brother) to establish a Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA). Carnegie Provost, Elliott Dunlap Smith, and G. Lee Bach, chairman of the economics department, led the planning effort for GSIA. Cooper suggested that Herb be invited to join in these discussions. This resulted in an offer to Herb to join Carnegie as chairman of the Department of Industrial Engineering. He accepted, and he and Dorothea, and their three children, moved to their new house on Northumberland Street in the summer of 1949. The house was located a mile from work—every day for the next 47 years, Herb walked back and forth to Carnegie for a total of 25,000 miles (Frank 2004, 12). [Carnegie was joined with the Mellon Institute of Science in 1965 and renamed Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)].

BOUNDED HOUSE HUNTING

‘‘On a trip to Pittsburgh in April 1949 … I took a long walk early one morning through much of the northern part of Squirrel Hill. Just before this visit, I had drawn on a map of Pittsburgh a circle of one mile radius around the Carnegie Tech campus, for I was resolved to walk to work … and had checked the census tract data to discover which portions of this area were inhabited by college-educated middle- class families. I looked in these portions for a house we could afford’’ (Simon 1991, 136–137).

Herb’s early years at GSIA encompass a remarkable story. He continued to conduct research in several different areas including organization theory, economics, and OR. The breadth of the topics Herb was actively pursuing is reflected in the compilation of his papers entitled Models of Man (Simon 1957). As part of the new GSIA administrative faculty, Herb played a pivotal role in steering the organization through its formative years—an important exercise in institution building, arguably his most significant within the area of management education. Their common goal was to ‘‘place business education on a foundation of fundamental studies in economics and behavioral science’’ (Simon 1978c). As Herb put it years later:

We felt like we were going to have the first business school that had academic respectability, scientific respectability, and we didn’t think it needed to run like dead-headed, old-fashioned business schools, or we wouldn’t have been there. None of the people who came in were from a business school background. We came in with the understanding that we were going to build a different kind of business school, that we were going to experiment and see where these new ideas—operations research, or management science . . . and organization theory . . . led (McCorduck 1979, 139).

It was also during this period that Harold Guetzkow, Charles Holt, George Kozmetsky, and Franco Modigliani joined the GSIA faculty. The school focused on two main research areas: organizational behavior and management science (MS). Herb and Harold led the former, with Bill Cooper taking charge of the latter. One of Bill’s projects, planned in a document dated February 1950, was called production technology. Herb was a member of one of the two MS research teams directed by Bill—the paint-factory project, funded by the Office of Naval Research.

The paint factory research focused on production planning at a single plant of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company (now PPG industries) located in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Three researchers joined Herb to form the project team: Charles Holt, an electrical engineer; economist Franco Modigliani, who had previously worked on production smoothing; and Jack Muth, a ‘‘green graduate student’’ with an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering who was studying for his Ph.D. at GSIA (Muth 2004, 377).

In joining this team, Herb’s primary interest was to understand how managers actually made decisions in organizations (Holt 2002, 96). The results of the project led to the book, Planning Production, Inventories, and Work Force (Holt et al. 1960), commonly referred to as HMMS. HMMS is a true classic of the OR literature—it pays equal attention to theory and practice, combining insightful modeling with elegant mathematics.

Herb continued his research on organizations, especially the descriptive study of organizational decision making, well into the 1950s. An early project Herb participated in was led by George Kozmestky and funded by the Controllership Foundation. This work studied organizational issues of the controller’s function in large firms (Simon et al. 1954). His work with Harold Guetzkow and James March on a project funded by the Ford Foundation to inventory various theories of organization led to the book, Organizations (March and Simon 1958), and several papers in Models of Man (Simon 1957).

Another topic of lasting interest to Herb was aggregation and decomposability in mathematical models. In work with Albert Ando in 1956, Herb considered the case of a system composed of sectors, where strong interactions took place within each sector but interactions across sectors were weak (Simon and Ando 1961). Mathematically, this led to a study of nearly block-diagonal structure with few off-diagonal elements and methods for their inversion. In his expository account, Herb discusses the implications of such structures for decomposability along with an example (Simon 1996, 197–200). Egidi and Marengo (2004) discuss how the topic of near-decomposability is a recurrent theme in Herb’s work in different disciplines.

THE TRANSITION OF 1955: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)

Herb has called 1955–1956 as the most important years of his life as a scientist (Simon 1991, 189). While the scope of his research efforts had been broad and interdisciplinary prior to 1955, he was typically identified as an economist and political scientist. In the last months of 1955, his work in human problem solving opened up an entirely new direction that soon assumed a central position and absorbed most, if not all, of his research activity.

Herb believed that a deeper understanding of decision making required a theory of human problem solving and knowledge of the processes people use to solve complex problems. Computers were just emerging as viable tools for such research. Herb’s strategic insight was to realize the potential of computers and to stress their ability and capacity for processing symbols, rather than crunching numbers. In 1952, while consulting at RAND, he met Allen (Al) Newell at the System Research Laboratory. There, Al and J. Clifford (Cliff) Shaw had already collaborated on computer-generated radar maps. Al was 25 years old and already an accomplished researcher. Herb and Al immediately recognized their intellectual affinity: they both viewed the human mind as a ‘‘symbol-manipulating’’ (Herb’s term) or ‘‘information-processing’’ (Al’s term) system (Simon 1991, 168).

By 1954, computer simulation of human cognition and heuristic problem solving took center stage in their joint research. Both were intrigued by the possibility of using computers as non-numerical processors—Herb taught himself to program the IBM 701. In time, they were recognized as two of the founding fathers of computer science. [Herb’s seminal role in the birth of AI is described in McCorduck (1979).]

December 15, 1955, is the day that computer-based, heuristic- problem solving was born. On that day, he and Al had the insight on how to program a thinking machine. Together, the Newell-Shaw-Simon (NSS) team implemented their vision to create Logic Theorist (LT), a computer program that used heuristic rules to prove theorems. LT used a list processing language they developed and was the first operational AI program presented at the Dartmouth work- shop on AI in June, 1956. On August 9, 1956, LT produced the first complete proof of theorem 2.01 given in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. By 1957, they had developed GPS (General Problem Solver), a pro- gram that used means-end analysis as a general strategy. (In problem solving, means-end analysis refers to the notion of using rules of thumb to move from the current state to the desired state by succes- sively reducing the gap between the current and desired states.)

THE MACHINE THAT THOUGHT

‘‘I was an undergraduate senior, but I was taking a graduate course over in GSIA from Herb Simon… . It was just after Christmas vacation— January 1956—when Herb Simon came into the classroom and said: ‘Over Christmas, Allen Newell and I invented a thinking machine.’ And we all looked blank. . . so we said, ‘Well what do you mean by a thinking machine? And in particular, what do you mean by a machine?’ In response to that, he put down on the table a bunch of IBM 701 manuals and said, ‘Here, take this home and read it and you’ll find out what I mean by a machine.’ Carnegie Tech did not have a 701, but RAND did, though it was actually the Johnniac that Newell, Shaw, and Simon were working with. But Herb chose the 701 as an introduction for us’’ [Edward Feigenbaum cited in McCorduck (2004, 138)].

The NSS theory of human information processing was based on the considerable experience gained from LT. It views problem solving as a heuristic search that uses simple rules and finds its formal expression in a computer program. NSS introduced such foundational concepts of AI as list processing languages, heuristic search, production rules, means-end analysis, and verbal protocols.

The book, Human Problem Solving (Newell and Simon 1972), presented an integrated view of the research program of the NSS team. The computer scientist, Edward Feigenbaum, characterized it as ‘‘perhaps the most important book on the scientific study of human thinking in the 20th century’’ (Feigenbaum 2001, 2107). In their 1975 Turing Lecture, Al and Herb described the notion of a physical symbol system as ‘‘a machine that produces through time an evolving collection of symbol structures,’’ an example would be the computer (Newell and Simon 1976, 116). They formulated the physical symbol system hypothesis: ‘‘A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent system’’ (Newell and Simon 1976, 116). This allowed them to consider artificial intelligence and the understanding of human problem solving as two facets of the same scientific program. Feigenbaum observed that Herb ultimately found programming languages to be richer than mathematics in modeling the complex problem-solving processes his team was studying (Feigenbaum 2001).

In 1965, Herb left GSIA to join the CMU computer science (CS) department; he was appointed the Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology, a position he held for the remainder of his life. In 1968, Herb was invited to give the Karl Taylor Compton lectures at MIT. This provided him with the opportunity to present his thoughts on the interface between computers, problem solving, AI, and design in a series of lectures he called ‘‘The Sciences of the Artificial.’’ In one of these lectures, he urged that design be developed as part of the engineering curriculum. This led to the formation of the Design Research Center at CMU—the first center of its kind (Simon 1991, 259). The lectures formed the basis of his book, Sciences of the Artificial (Simon 1965).

Herb was at CMU for over 50 years—his impact was on the institution was extensive. Besides helping to launch GSIA, he also helped create the CS department, the Robotics Institute, and the Design Research Center, as well as forming the cognitive science group within the psychology department. As a member of the university board of trustees, his views were heard at the highest level.

Herb made two important decisions about his role as a university administrator. In 1961, when the GSIA dean, Lee Bach, decided to leave Carnegie, Herb was associate dean and viewed as a possible successor to Bach. Herb, however, declined to express interest in the position because he felt that this would leave little time for his own research. Similarly, in 1972 when CMU was searching for a new president, Herb and the GSIA economist Dick Cyert were candidates for the job. Herb withdrew as a candidate, but served on the search committee. This time, he felt uncomfortable with the ‘‘close association with the business community that is essential for effective performance as president’’ (Simon 1991, 263).

THE NOBEL PRIZE

Early in 1969, Herb visited Sweden to take part in a joint seminar between CMU and Scandinavian business faculty. The initiation of the new The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences) had just been announced, with the first prize to be awarded in the fall of 1969. Walter Goldberg, a business economist who was attending the seminar, predicted, in a conversation with Herb, ‘‘You will receive the prize within the next ten years.’’ Herb was incredulous about that happening—he felt that economists did not regard him as an economist (Simon 1991, 320). On Monday, October 16, 1978, at 6:00 a.m. Pittsburgh time, Herb received a call from Stockholm that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Significantly, this was not a shared prize. In early December, Herb and his family attended Nobel week in Stockholm, where he presented his Nobel lecture on December 8, 1978 (Simon 1979a). He delivered one of his banquet speeches in Swedish.

The choice of Herb as a Nobel laureate was somewhat unexpected in view of his sustained criticism of the classical economic paradigm for decision making (a rational decision maker maximizes the utility of the decision). In part, Herb attributed his selection to the fact that he was a ‘‘duly certified member of the Econometric Mafia’’ and ‘‘an insider to its elite’’ (Simon 1991, 326). He defined this group as fellows of the Econometric Society in 1954—the year in which he was elected a fellow. These were the thought leaders responsible for ‘‘the sudden conquest of economics by mathematics and statistics’’ (Simon 1991, 325–326). The 1954 list of fellows contained 120 names, only about 80 of which were alive in 1969, the year the first Nobel Prize in economics was awarded (the prize is awarded to the living). Herb notes that 20 of the first 27 Nobel laureates belonged to this group. He knew about half the fellows, and nearly all the previous prize winners. Coupled with the highly favorable incidence of Nobel Prizes awarded to the fellows, Herb’s visibility within this elite group contributed to his selection for the Nobel Prize.

Herb’s Nobel lecture is a masterful account of bounded rationality and his intellectual trajectory in advancing this concept (Simon 1978c). He appreciated the renewed attention that the Nobel Prize would draw to his research and planned to use the opportunity as a bully pulpit for presenting his ideas (Simon 1991, 324). He estimated that because of the Nobel Prize, he was spending about 10% of his research time ‘‘thinking about the application of bounded rationality to economic theory’’ (Simon 1991, 325). He continued his polemics with the economics profession in his American Economic Association Ely Lecture ‘‘Rationality as process and as product of thought’’ (Simon 1978a), his paper ‘‘How to decide what to do’’ (Simon 1978b), and his article questioning the empirical evidence supporting neoclassical theory (Simon 1979b).

MAJOR THEMES IN DECISION MAKING: ADMINISTRATIVE BEHAVIOR, BOUNDED RATIONALITY, AND PRODUCTION PLANNING

ADMINISTRATIVE BEHAVIOR AS DECISION MAKING

Herb’s first book, Administrative Behavior (Simon 1947), stemmed from his doctoral dissertation. Initially off to a slow start, the book achieved a pervasive influence over the years and became a staple of schools of business and public administration. The Nobel Prize press release called the book epoch-making; it was named as Book of the Half Century by Public Administration Review and appeared in its fourth edition in 1997. It is rare for a book on management to hold up so well after 60 years.

In his preface to Administrative Behavior, Herb modestly pointed out that the book does not offer a theory of administration: ‘‘If any ‘theory’ is involved, it is that decision-making is the heart of administration, and that the vocabulary of administrative behavior must be derived from the logic and psychology of human choice’’ (Simon 1997, xi).

Early in the book, Herb registers his dissatisfaction with the received wisdom in administration and its commonly cited adages. Herb felt that the literature on public administration showed a general neglect of decision making, save for the book The Functions of the Executive by the executive Chester Barnard (1938), which he cited as a motivation for his work, and a paper by the political scientist Edwin Stene (1940). In Administrative Behavior (Chapter 3), Herb assigned a central place to decisions in administration:

At each moment, the behaving subject, or the organization composed of numbers of such individuals, is confronted with a large number of alternative behaviors, some of which are present in consciousness and some of which are not. Decision . . . is the process by which one of these alternatives for each moment’s behavior is selected to be carried out. The series of such decisions which determines behavior over some stretch of time may be called a strategy . . . . The task of rational decision is to select that one of the strategies which is followed by a preferred set of consequences. . . . The task of decision involves three steps: (1) the listing of all of the alternative strategies; (2) the determination of all the consequences that follow upon each of these strategies; (3) the comparative evaluation of these sets of consequences (Simon 1997, 77).

At this point, Herb adds the crucial modifying phrase: ‘‘it is impossible for the individual to know all his alternatives or all their consequences and the impossibility is a very important departure of actual behavior from objective rationality’’ (Simon 1997, 77). This set the stage for thinking about limits to rationality.

In Chapter 5 of Administrative Behavior, Herb explores these limits that arise because (1) knowledge of consequences is incomplete, (2) future consequences are imperfectly anticipated, and (3) only a few of all possible alternatives ever come to mind. He concludes:

The central concern of administrative theory is the boundary between the rational and the nonrational aspects of human social behavior. Administrative theory is peculiarly the theory of intended and bounded rationality—of the behavior of human beings who satisfice because they have not the wits to maximize (Simon 1997, 118).

Although the seeds of bounded rationality were already present in Administrative Behavior, Herb noted that, in 1947, ‘‘limited rationality was defined largely as a residual category—as a departure from rationality’’ (Simon 1997, 118). The theoretical framework for the concept of bounded rationality came later.

BOUNDED RATIONALITY

Bounded rationality is regarded as Herb’s signature contribution to the economic and social sciences. This principle argues:

The capacity of the human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared with the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world—or even for a reasonable approximation to such objective reality (Simon, 1957, 198).

James March summarizes the original idea of bounded rationality as follows:

. . . it is well to recall that the original argument was a narrow one. It started from the proposition that all intendedly rational behavior is behavior within constraints. Simon added the idea that the list of technical constraints on choice should include some properties of human beings as processors of information and as problem solvers. The limitations were limitations of computational capability, the organization and utilization of memory, and the like. Human beings develop procedures that are sensible, given the constraints . . . . As a short-hand label for such procedures, he coined the term ‘‘satisficing’’ (March 1978, 590).

In the early 1950s, Herb set out to replace the notion of rationality of classical economics with an appropriate alternative. Herb’s motivation for introducing this change was clear from the beginning:

Broadly stated, the task is to replace the global rationality of economic man with a kind of rational behavior that is compatible with the access to information and the computational capabilities that are actually possessed by organisms, including man, in the kinds of environments in which such organisms exist (Simon 1955a, 99).

In explaining the properties of the ‘‘choosing organism,’’ Herb noted that ‘‘the state of information may as well be regarded as a characteristic of the decision-maker as a characteristic of his environment’’ (Simon 1955a, 100). Identifying the environment as an important element of the explanation developed into a recurrent theme in Herb’s subsequent research, specially his later work on complexity (Simon 1956).

The framework for this notion of approximate rationality was developed in his seminal papers on a behavioral model of rational choice (Simon 1955a, 1956a) and the book Models of Man (Simon 1957). In ‘‘A behavioral model of rational choice’’ (Simon 1955a), Herb reviews the key elements of the classical optimization framework of rational choice: a set of alternatives to choose from, future outcomes of choice, and information as to which outcomes will occur if a particular choice is made. Given a payoff function that specifies the utility for each possible outcome, the optimal rational choice is the one that maximizes the (expected) utility. Arguing that the computations required to find the optimal choice places an unrealistic burden on the decision maker, Herb then systematically simplifies the various components to reduce this burden. Instead of looking for the best payoff at a given stage, the decision maker may simply stop searching when a certain aspiration level is met. While aspiration levels may change dynamically as the search proceeds, eventually, they provide a criterion for concluding the search.

The use of aspiration levels and identification of subgoals recognize the cognitive limitations of human beings. In the search for solutions, an effective strategy is to substitute ‘‘the goal of satisficing, of finding a good enough move, for the goal of maximizing, of finding the best move’’ (Simon 1957, 205). A satisficing decision maker will be content with achieving an aspiration level set in advance. If a solution meeting this aspiration level can be found, the search will be stopped, otherwise the aspiration level will be lowered. Given the bounded and uncertain nature of the real world, Herb argued that satisficing behavior based on rules of thumb is a more accurate representation of real decision-making behavior. Further, he also felt these have greater explaining power:

Models of satisficing behavior are richer than models of maximizing behavior because they treat not only of equilibrium but of the method of reaching it as well. Psychological studies of the formation and change of aspiration levels support propositions of the following kinds. (a) When performance falls short of the level of aspiration, search behavior (particularly search for new alternatives) is induced. (b) At the same time, the level of aspiration begins to adjust itself downward until goals reach levels that are practically available. (c) If the two mechanisms just listed operate too slowly to adapt aspirations to performance, emotional behavior—apathy or aggression, for example— will replace rational adaptive behavior (Simon 1959, 263).

As March (1978) has pointed out, subsequent developments of the theory of bounded rationality were extensive. Herb’s own work in this area was published in two volumes (Simon 1982). As used by others, distortions of the original theory were introduced, some of which did not meet with Herb’s approval. To define the notion of rationality more precisely, Herb himself made a distinction between substantive and procedural rationality. March (1978) lists a number of alternative notions of rationality.

PRODUCTION PLANNING: THE HMMS STUDY

One of Herb’s earliest papers in the area of operations was in production control. Around 1948, he became interested in using feedback control for economic systems and was delighted to discover that his father had been a designer of control gear. Herb investigated the application of servomechanism theory to production systems (Simon 1952). The problem was to control the production rate of a single item in continuous time so as to minimize the sum of production and inventory-related costs. These were the days before optimal control theory, so Herb used the techniques of transforms for feedback control. Interestingly, the variable production costs varied with changes in the production rate, as was the case with the subsequent full-scale paint factory HMMS study. A follow-up to this work that incorporated some of the paint factory results was published by Simon and Holt (1954).

The HMMS study (for the PPG paint factory) may be viewed as the foundation of aggregate production and inventory planning. The independent decision variables for the firm are, for each time period t, the aggregate production level Pt and the aggregate work force level Wt. Given these, the inventory level It at the end of each period can be obtained (It is unrestricted in sign). The objective is to minimize the sum of production, workforce-related, and inventory-related costs. Nonlinearities arise in modeling the cost of overtime or changes in the level of the work force (hiring and firing costs). In the HMMS model, the main idea is to approximate all costs components as quadratic functions in Pt, Wt, and It so that the first-order optimality conditions result in linear decision rules. Specifically, these rules express the optimal values of Pt and Wt as linear expressions in terms of Wt􏰴I; It􏰴I, and orders for the current and future time periods (Holt et al. 1955).

The HMMS model also provides a good illustration of how Herb saw the connection between the notion of satisficing and modeling strategies in MS. In his Nobel lecture, Herb referred to this work when he contrasted two possible approaches to model construction in MS:

Now the salient characteristic of the decision tools employed in management science is that they have to be capable of actually making or recommending decisions, taking as their inputs the kinds of empirical data that are available in the real world, and performing only such computations as can reasonably be performed by existing desk calculators or, a little later, electronic computers. For these domains, idealized models of optimizing entrepreneurs, equipped with complete certainty about the world—or, at worst, having full probability distributions for uncertain events—are of little use. Models have to be fashioned with an eye to practical computability, no matter how severe the approximations and simplifications that are thereby imposed on them. The first is to retain optimization, but to simplify sufficiently so that the optimum (in the simplified world!) is computable. The second is to construct satisficing models that provide good enough decisions with reasonable costs of computation. By giving up optimization, a richer set of properties in the real world can be retained in the models … . Neither approach, in general, dominates the other, and both have continued to co-exist in the world of management science (Simon 1979a, 498).

The HMMS study led to two important developments. The paint factory data showed the need for better forecasts that would also be practical to use for a large number of items. Holt modified the exponential smoothing method to handle trend and seasonal effects. This led to the Holt-Winters model of forecasting (Holt 2002, 98). A more significant development for economics was Herb’s paper on dynamic optimization under a quadratic cost objective (Simon 1956b). Herb showed that to derive the optimal decisions, the expected values suffice as the certainty equivalents. This is true as long as the costs are quadratic and the residual variance is independent of the decisions. Thus, in the HMMS model, the assumption of quadratic costs not only results in optimal linear decision rules, but also ensures that only the expected values (and not the higher moments or entire distributions) of the uncertain quantities enter into the decision rule. This result, called certainty equivalence, was proved by Herb and Charles Holt (Holt et al. 1955, 16). More important, it led to the development of the theory of rational expectations in economics.

Although the HMMS study used a substantial amount of analysis and mathematical machinery, the members of the team, to their credit, were also concerned with model validation and implementation issues. The results of the model were compared with factory performance under different decision rules and forecasting techniques. The linear decision rules proved to be superior—a conservative estimate indicated cost savings of 8.5%, with further savings possible with improved forecasting (Holt et al. 1955). But, when it was decided to implement the optimal plan, difficulties were encountered; they were resolved eventually and the HMMS results were implemented at all 70 PPG factories (Holt 2002, 97).

BOLD HYPOTHESIS

Herb’s certainty-equivalence result led Jack Muth to propose a bold hypothesis—a new theory of expectations that extended rationality considerably beyond even what the classical theory suggested. Responding to Herb’s view that the decision maker cannot estimate ‘‘the joint probability of future events’’ in such a way as to ‘‘maximize the expected value or utility or profit’’ (Simon 1959, 268), especially in the presence of changes over time, Jack’s hypothesis was based on exactly the opposite point of view: ‘‘that dynamic models do not assume enough rationality.’’ Instead, he proposed ‘‘that expectations of firms (or, more generally, the subjective probability distribution of outcomes) tend to be distributed, for the same information set, about the prediction of the theory (or the ‘objective’ probability distribution of outcomes)’’ Muth (1961, 316).

This rational expectations theory found favor with economists in the 1970s, constituting a new orthodoxy with assumptions directly opposed to those of bounded rationality. Although Herb did not believe that this theory described the real state of affairs, he felt that Muth surely deserved a Nobel Prize for its formulation. Robert Lucas, building on Muth’s rational expectation model, extended that research to earn a Nobel Prize in 1995. Commenting on the close and amicable relations of the four men who made up the HMMS team, Herb wrote: ‘‘The HMMS research team harbored simultaneously two Keynesians (Modigliani and Holt), the prophet of bounded rationality (Simon), and the inventor of rational expectations (Muth)—the previous orthodoxy, a heresy, and a new orthodoxy’’ (Simon 1991, 250).

OR MODELING AND AI

Even as Herb’s interests moved toward the cognitive sciences and AI, he continued to think about the implications of these new areas for OR. He focused on presenting his view of heuristic problem solving to the OR community at ORSA’s 12th national meeting in November 1957. After recognizing the significant contributions of OR to ‘‘those management decisions that can be reduced to systematic computational routines,’’ he stated that ‘‘large areas of managerial activity . . . have hardly been touched by operations research or the advances of management sciences’’ (Simon and Newell 1958, 3–4). These areas are typically ill-structured but important decisions of top-level executives. Simon and Newell suggested that advances in heuristic problem solving would narrow the gap between these areas and the well-structured problems OR had addressed.

The Simon and Newell (1958) paper attracted a certain degree of notoriety in which the authors state four predictions with respect to AI and heuristic problem solving that were to be realized within 10 years of 1957. While these predictions did not come to pass within the proposed time frame, Herb’s view of heuristics in reasoning influenced several theoretical and applied areas of OR by the 1980s. In the late 1980s, Herb continued to argue for a closer connection between AI and OR (Simon 1987).

Herb became intrigued by the new areas of chaos and complexity and their implications for modeling and design. He argued that chaos has raised serious doubts about the possibility of designing good predictive models. Starting with a critique of the Club of Rome limits to growth model and its predictions, Herb invited the OR community to consider the limitations and misuse of predictive models—OR analysts should redirect their modeling efforts ‘‘to focus them on the questions that we can answer more or less definitely.’’ He also restated his view that ‘‘intelligent approximation, not brute force computation, is still the key to effective modeling’’ (Simon 1990, 10–11).

THE CLOUDED CRYSTAL BALL

  1. Within the next ten years a digital computer will be the world’s chess champion, unless the rules bar it from competition.
  2. Within the next ten years a digital computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem.
  3. Within the next ten years a digital computer will write music that will be accepted by critics as possessing considerable aesthetic value.
  4. Within the next ten years most theories in psychology will take the form of computer programs, or of qualitative statement about the characteristics of computer programs.

(Simon and Newell 1958, 7–8)

For the last 25 years of his research career, Herb continued to develop and explore computer models of cognition in different domains. He studied and used computer-based simulation programs of learning processes, the role of representation and framing in problem solving, what made problems hard, and scientific discovery. Aiming at the non- specialist, Herb described the main themes of this period in the third edition of Sciences of the Artificial (Simon 1996).

THE SCIENTIST AS ADMINISTRATOR OR POLITICIAN

Herb maintained a consistent interest in science policy issues. This interest began with his involvement with the Ford Foundation where he served as an advisor and member of the board of directors of the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC), and served as its chair from 1967 to 1971. In keeping with SSRC’s mission, Herb acted as a strong advocate for interdisciplinary initiatives in this role. He argued against narrow area studies and other SSRC activities that lay within single disciplines. He also challenged research funding that was motivated by undue disciplinary loyalties.

In the 1960s, the focus of his activities shifted to the National Research Council (NRC), a unit within National Academy of the Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C. The elected membership of the NAS included mainly physical and biological scientists and very few social scientists. Herb and several others decided to rectify this situation—his approach was to effect change from within. The NRC’s Division of Anthropology and Psychology did include social scientists and demographers. Herb was invited to join the board of this group, to be groomed as a prospective chair. This led to his election to the NAS in 1967. He then joined with other nominating groups to bring such social scientists as the economists Kenneth Arrow, Tjalling Koopmans, Robert Merton, and Paul Samuelson into the NAS. The new NAS structure formalized in 1972 recognized a new class of membership for Social and Behavioral scholars.

During 1968–1971, Herb served on the Committee on Science and Public Policy of the NAS. Herb found this assignment highly rewarding: ‘‘Members, whatever our own expertise, received a broad education in every part of science with outstanding experts as our teachers. Most important of all was the sheer pleasure of associating with bright, wide- ranging minds, and sharp wits’’ (Simon 1991, 294). Beyond such personal satisfaction, Herb also recounted his experiences on committees as mini- cases to illustrate organizational or political issues (Simon 1983).

In January 1968, Herb became a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), having been appointed by President Lyndon Johnson—he was the first social scientist to so serve—and he continued to serve through the first Nixon administration. Dominated by physicists [‘physics mafia’’ (Simon 1991, 294)], it was highly atypical of PSAC to include a social scientist. While Herb was most likely elected by virtue of his expertise in AI and computer science, he and others viewed this as an opportunity to cause PSAC to include social scientists. Herb served on several PSAC panels, including two focusing on environmental and educational issues.

In the 1980s, Herb became quite involved with scientific exchanges with China. (He spent more time in China than in any other foreign country.) His first trip to China was in 1972 as part of a delegation of six computer scientists (and two wives, including Dorothea) that took them to Canton, Shanghai, and Beijing for lectures and discussions with Chinese researchers, teachers, and students (this was during the time of Mao’s cultural revolution). His second trip was in 1980 with a delegation from the American Psychological Association, 4 years after the removal of the Gang of Four, when China was showing the first signs of economic reform. In 1983, Herb became chair of the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China—a body created by the NAS and the SSRC. His 4-year appointment as chair (1983–1987) gave him a weightier role; he made annual trips to China with each one including a heavy program of visits, lectures, and teaching. In June 1989, Herb’s usual summer visit to China was shortened to 2 days as he passed though Beijing during the Tiananmen Square uprising. Herb is one of the few foreigners to be elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

HOW TO RANK, CHINESE STYLE

‘‘From the moment we arrived at Canton [1972 visit], the Chinese were very curious about our ages. No matter how often we told them, they would ask again. Then we began to realize that, when our names were arranged in alphabetical order (and how else would Americans arrange them?), our ages coincidently ran strictly from youngest to oldest (myself). But it was in that order that we were seated at banquets—from highest to lowest. And it was in that order that our cars proceeded in autocade. (Foreign visitors being rare at that time, each of us had a car, driver, and an interpreter.) How wondered the Chinese, could the head of the party be the youngest, and the oldest be the last?’’ (Simon 1991, 341).

ON THE PERSONAL SIDE

Throughout his life, Herb maintained research as his top priority. He called himself a ‘‘monomaniac about the study of decision making’’ (Augier and Feigenbaum 2003, 196). Much has been written about Herb’s ways of thinking and approach to problem solving by those who have worked and learned from him (Augier and March 2004). Feigenbaum (2004, 384) sums it up succinctly by stressing Herb’s main theme of unity and drive toward simplicity: ‘‘human problem solving is but an instance of a general information processing theory of problem solving that is as valid for artifacts (like computers) as for people.’’ Here, simplicity occurs in Herb’s simple goal-seeking rules, preference for simple (or near-decomposable) architectures, and heuristic problem solving.

Herb admitted to being a workaholic and characterized long bouts of intense work as fun (Klahr and Kotovsky 2001). His friends remember him as a perpetually curious man. He simply never stopped thinking—thinking was his passion. Given a lull in a conversation, he would introduce a topic and engage his listeners in active dialogue. Or, he could convene an impromptu seminar while waiting for a guest in a hallway (Larkey 2002, 239). A simple observation from everyday life could launch him into hours of mental activity, trying to offer a plausible account of the observation (Crowther-Heyck 2005, 312). His colleague David Klahr recalls how during a long drive in a car, he said something to Herb about the roads being deserted. This launched Herb into a mental calculation of the density of cars on the interstates at 1:00 a.m. (Klahr 2004, 444).

Herb remained intellectually active until the last days of his life. One of the last manuscripts he commented on was the one Bill Cooper wrote for the 50th anniversary issue of the journal Operations Research (Cooper 2002; 2004, 74). Herb always enjoyed a vigorous debate with his colleagues, and had a reputation as a polemicist. His arguments were exacting, but never ad hominem. If he started a remark with ‘‘Look friend. . .’’ this meant that the gloves were off and that the flaws in his interlocutor’s argument would be laid bare (Larkey 2002, 241).

Herb was also a dedicated teacher and took institution building and professional service seriously (Klahr and Kotovsky 2001). He was patient and tolerant with his students, whom he invited to think in class (instead of taking notes). Nor did he try to cut corners when it came to teaching. He did ‘‘a sizeable portion of the TAs [teaching assistants] job himself’’ and read student progress reports because they were exciting. Faced with a doubling in the size of a core course, he said ‘you know, when people come to you and want to learn—you should teach them’’’ (Kotovsky 2004, 458). His doctoral students included Ed Feigenbaum, David Klahr, Kenneth Kotovsky, Pat Langley, Jack Muth, Harry Pople, and Raul Valdez-Peres.

A SATISFICING LUNCH—SAY CHEESE

‘‘I particularly love [this anecdote] because it shows how Herb applied the ‘satisficing’ precept to his own life. . . . Herb thought of ‘satisficing’ as a way of cutting down on decision time in a world that required too many decisions relative to available time. During our frequent lunches, we observed how Herb always ordered the same lunch: American cheese on white. . . . He explained that he had adopted a rule for lunch: when faced with a choice, he would always request American cheese on white. This order … avoided time-consuming decisions about what to choose and could certainly be executed anywhere in the U.S. Though the outcome might not be the most refined dish available, it was ‘good enough’ ’’ (Modigliani 2004, 374).

Herb kept his family life private and wrote little about it. Glimpses of Herb as a father are provided by his elder daughter, Katherine (Kathie) Simon (Frank 2001, 2004). He found time for simple family pleasures with his three children. At times, he was a stern father and the disciplinarian of the family, but it was important to him that his children learn to make their own decisions. Kathie recounts how Herb invited his family to a Carnegie classroom to simulate computer-based problem solving. Following instructions written on cards, each of the three children acted as a subroutine with the role of the executive program reserved for Dorothea (Frank 2001).

While a private man, Herb also formed lifelong friendships. The tributes to Herb in the memorial collection of retrospective essays tell of his impact on his good friends (Augier and March 2004). He hung seven portraits on the walls of his study: his father, Arthur Simon; Chester Barnard; Albert Einstein; Abraham Lincoln; Charles Merriam; Clarence Ridley; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Simon 1991, 72). As his admired leaders or teachers, these and a few others directly influenced his intellectual development. In conducting his own affairs, he was a (bounded) rationalist through and through, preferring not to devote much time or attention to insignificant decisions (Frank 2004).

WITHOUT MINOTAUR

‘‘I have encountered many branches in the maze of my life’s path, where I have followed now the left fork, now the right. The metaphor of the maze is irresistible to someone who has devoted his scientific career to understanding human choice. And if I had not encountered labyrinths early in my life, I would have met them later in the stories of Jorge Luis Borges . . . .

‘‘In describing my life as mazelike, I do not mean that I have made a large number of deliberate, wrenching decisions to go off in one direction or another. On the contrary, I have made very few. Obvious responses to opportunities and circumstances, rather than studied decisions, have put me on the particular roads I have followed’’ (Simon 1991, xvii–xviii).

Herb did not watch television, rarely listened to the radio, and claimed that reading newspapers was a waste of time. He did enjoy playing piano, listening to music, reading, and learning languages. He read novels frequently and twice read the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in the original language (McCorduck 2004, 476). In his memoirs, Herb describes his conversation with the writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina in 1970 (Simon 1991, 175–179). Herb was struck by how Borges described life as a search through a maze in his book of short stories Ficciones. This moved Herb to write a short story on this theme (The Apple: A Story of a Maze; Simon 1991, 180–188) which he regarded as a nontechnical introduction to his work. Accordingly, the metaphor of a maze runs through his memoirs.

In mid-January 2001, Herb underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his abdomen. The surgery was successful but complications developed in the ensuing weeks:

At the end, there was an issue of how invasive the attempts to prolong his life should be. His daughter Kathie has related how he finally told her it was time for him to go. He told her, about a day before his passing, that life has a beginning, a middle, and an end, that there were no projects he’d started that he was essential for, and that it was time for the end (Kotovosky 2004, 458).

Herb died on Friday, February 10, 2001. He was survived by his wife Dorothea, who died on August 15, 2002, and his three children: Kathie Simon Frank of Minneapolis; Peter A. Simon of Bryan, Texas; and Barbara M. Simon of Wilder, Vermont.

HONORS AND AWARDS

Herb’s contributions were recognized across social and scientific fields: American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, 1969; Association of Computing Machinery Turing Award (jointly with Allen Newell), 1975; Nobel Prize in Economics, 1978; National Medal of Science, 1986; ORSA-TIMS 1988 John von Neumann Theory Prize. He was a member of and/or received awards from: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1959; National Academy of Sciences, 1967; American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, 1969; American Economic Association Distinguished Fellow 1976, Ely Lecturer 1977; Academy of Management Scholarly Contributions Award, 1983; American Political Science Association James Madison Award that recognizes an American political scientist who has made a distinguished scholarly contribution to political science, 1984; John M. Gaus Award and Lectureship for a lifetime of exemplary scholarship; Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology, 1993; American Society of Public Administration Dwight Waldo Award for outstanding contributions to the professional literature of public administration, 1995. Herb was a member of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies’ Hall of Fame (Assad 2004); a foreign member of the Chinese, Japanese, and Russian academies of science; and he was awarded over 20 honorary doctorates.

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  • Simon HA (1956b) Dynamic programming under uncertainty with a quadratic criterion function. Econometrica 24(1):74–81
  • Simon HA (1957) Models of man: social and rational. Wiley, New York, NY
  • Simon HA (1959) Theories of decision-making in economics and behavioral science. Am Econ Rev 49(3):253–283
  • Simon HA (1965) The sciences of the artificial. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
  • Simon HA (1978a) Rationality as process and as product of thought. Am Econ Rev 68(2):1–16
  • Simon HA (1978b) On how to decide what to do. Bell J Econ 9(2):494–507
  • Simon HA (1978c) Autobiography (Nobel Prize Web site). http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1978/simon-autobio.html. Accessed 13 Jun 2009 Simon HA (1979a) Rational decision making in business organizations (The Nobel Prize lecture of December 8, 1978). Am Econ Rev 69(4):493–513
  • Simon HA (1979b) On parsimonious explanations of production relations. Scand J Econ 81:459–474. (Reprinted in Models of Bounded Rationality, vol 1, 1982) Simon HA (1982) Models of bounded rationality: volumes I and II. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
  • Simon HA (1983) Reason in human affairs. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Simon HA (1987) Two heads are better than one: the collaboration between AI and OR. Interfaces 17(4):8–15
  • Simon HA (1990) Prediction and prescription in systems modeling. Oper Res 38(1):7–14
  • Simon HA (1991) Models of my life. Basic Books, New York, NY
  • Simon HA (1996) The sciences of the artificial, 3rd edn. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Simon HA (1997) Administrative behavior: a study of decision-making processes in administrative organizations, 4th edn. The Free Press, New York, NY
  • Simon HA (2001) On simulating Simon: his monomania, and its sources in bounded rationality. Stud Hist Philos Sci 32(3):501–505 272 Profiles in Operations Research
  • Simon HA, Ando A (1961) Aggregation of variables in dynamic systems. Econometrica 29:111–138
  • Simon HA, Bonini C (1958) The size distribution of business firms. Am Econ Rev 48(4):607–617
  • Simon HA, Holt C (1954) The control of inventories and production rates—a survey. J Oper Res Soc Am 2(3):289–301
  • Simon HA, Guetzkow H, Kozmetsky G, Tyndall H (1954) Centralization and decentralization in organizing the controller’s department. Controllership Foundation, New York, NY
  • Simon HA, Newell A (1958) Heuristic problem solving: the next advance in operations research. Oper Res 6(1):1–10
  • Simon HA, Newell A (1972) Human problem solving. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
  • Simon HA, Smithburg D, Thompson V (1950) Public administration. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY
  • Stene E (1940) An approach to a science of administration. Am Pol Sci Rev 34(6):1124–1137
  • Von Neumann J, Morgenstern O (1944) Theory of games and economic behavior. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ (2nd edn, 1947; 3rd edn, 1953)