Herbert A. Simon's Intellectual Aim

By the time I was ready to enter the University of Chicago, in 1933, I had a general sense of direction. The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the "hard" sciences so brilliantly successful. I would prepare myself to become a mathematical social scientist. By a combination of formal training and self study, the latter continuing systematically well into the 1940s, I was able to gain a broad base of knowledge in economics and political science, together with reasonable skills in advanced mathematics, symbolic logic, and mathematical statistics.

My most important mentor at Chicago was the econometrician and mathematical economist, Henry Schultz, but I studied too with Rudolf Carnap in logic, Nicholas Rashevsky in mathematical biophysics, and Harold D. Lasswell and Charles Merriam in political science. I also made a serious study of graduate-level physics in order to strengthen and practice my mathematical skills and to gain an intimate knowledge of what a "hard" science was like, particularly on the theoretical side. An unexpected by-product of the latter study has been a lifelong interest in the philosophy of physics and several publications on the axiomatization of classical mechanics.

      -- Herbert A. Simon, professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, Nobel Prize 1979

Stillteaching at what is now Carnegie-Mellon University, Simon is an academic jack-of-all-trades: computer and social scientist, cognitive psychologist, and philosopher. To Edward Feigenbaum, an AI pioneer at Stanford University, "Herb Simon is first and foremost a behavioral scientist. His genius lies in cutting through the immense complexities of human behavior to build elegantly simple models that work, that explain the data. He might well be the greatest behavioral scientist of the twentieth century....

Until the mid Fifties, Simon was an economist and political scientist. His 1978 Nobel Prize was in economics. He helped push conventional economics beyond neat (and accurate) supply and demand charts and toward the real-world complexity of psychology and behavioral science. His theory of "bounded rationality" subverted the classical view that organizations always make decisions that maximize profits and that, more broadly, individuals always pick the best choice among numerous alternatives. Instead, he observed, people are saddled with too much information and not enough brain power. As a result, whether setting prices or playing chess, they settle for the first choice that's "good enough." In Darwinian terms, it's survival of the fitter.

      -- Interview with Herbert A. Simon, by Doug Stewart, Omni,June 1994