Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American scholar whose work influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology.

Notably, Simon was among the pioneers of several modern-day scientific domains such as artificial intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, organization theory, and complex systems.

[16] Simon's mother, Edna Marguerite Merkel (1888–1969), was an accomplished pianist whose Jewish, Lutheran, and Catholic ancestors came from Braunschweig, Prague and Cologne.

While attending middle school, Simon wrote a letter to "the editor of the Milwaukee Journal defending the civil liberties of atheists".

While attending high school, Simon joined the debate team, where he argued "from conviction, rather than cussedness" in favor of George's single tax.

[19] In 1933, Simon entered the University of Chicago, and, following his early influences, decided to study social science and mathematics.

(1936) and his Ph.D. (1943) in political science from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Harold Lasswell, Nicolas Rashevsky, Rudolf Carnap, Henry Schultz, and Charles Edward Merriam.

There, he began participating in the seminars held by the staff of the Cowles Commission who at that time included Trygve Haavelmo, Jacob Marschak, and Tjalling Koopmans.

Marschak brought Simon in to assist in the study he was currently undertaking with Sam Schurr of the "prospective economic effects of atomic energy".

Seeking to replace the highly simplified classical approach to economic modeling, Simon became best known for his theory of corporate decision in his book Administrative Behavior.

[28] (p xxviii)Contrary to the "homo economicus" model, Simon argued that alternatives and consequences may be partly known, and means and ends imperfectly differentiated, incompletely related, or poorly detailed.

[28] Simon defined the task of rational decision making as selecting the alternative that results in the more preferred set of all the possible consequences.

[27] Simon attempted to determine the techniques or behavioral processes that a person or organization could bring to bear to achieve approximately the best result given limits on rational decision making.

[28] Simon writes: The human being striving for rationality and restricted within the limits of his knowledge has developed some working procedures that partially overcome these difficulties.

[27] Simon argued that the two outcomes of a choice require monitoring and that many members of the organization would be expected to focus on adequacy, but that administrative management must pay particular attention to the efficiency with which the desired result was obtained.

As a member of an organization, however, that individual makes decisions not in relationship to personal needs and results, but in an impersonal sense as part of the organizational intent, purpose, and effect.

[38] Simon was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, creating with Allen Newell the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (GPS) (1957) programs.

Simon responded to Neisser's views in 1963 by writing a paper on emotional cognition,[42] which he updated in 1967 and published in Psychological Review.

[10] With Allen Newell, Simon developed a theory for the simulation of human problem solving behavior using production rules.

He said that to become an expert on a topic required about ten years of experience and he and colleagues estimated that expertise was the result of learning roughly 50,000 chunks of information.

"In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. (Cliff) Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequentially [sic] with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing.

The popular work of the time argued that it was not apparent empirically that entrepreneurs needed to follow the marginalist principles of profit-maximization/cost-minimization in running organizations.

[51] However, in an earlier article, Bhargava (1997) noted the importance of Simon's arguments and emphasized that there are several applications of the "procedural" definition of rationality in econometric analyses of data on health.

In particular, economists should employ "auxiliary assumptions" that reflect the knowledge in the relevant biomedical fields, and guide the specification of econometric models for health outcomes.

[52] He determined that the internal organization of firms and the external business decisions thereof, did not conform to the neoclassical theories of "rational" decision-making.

[citation needed] Simon wrote many articles on the topic over the course of his life, mainly focusing on the issue of decision-making within the behavior of what he termed "bounded rationality".

[54] Simon's work has strongly influenced John Mighton, developer of a program that has achieved significant success in improving mathematics performance among elementary and high school students.

[56] Mighton cites a 2000 paper by Simon and two coauthors that counters arguments by French mathematics educator, Guy Brousseau, and others suggesting that excessive practice hampers children's understanding:[56] [The] criticism of practice (called "drill and kill," as if this phrase constituted empirical evaluation) is prominent in constructivist writings.

The instructional task is not to "kill" motivation by demanding drill, but to find tasks that provide practice while at the same time sustaining interest.Simon received many top-level honors in life, including becoming a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1959;[58][59] election as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1967;[60] APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Psychology (1969); the ACM's Turing Award for making "basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing" (1975); the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" (1978); the National Medal of Science (1986); Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (1990); the APA's Award for Outstanding Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (1993); ACM fellow (1994); and IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1995).

From 1950 to 1955, Simon studied mathematical economics and during this time, together with David Hawkins, discovered and proved the Hawkins–Simon theorem on the "conditions for the existence of positive solution vectors for input-output matrices".