Thomas L. Saaty

His employers at that time included the Operations Evaluation Group of MIT at the Pentagon, the Office of Naval Research, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the U.S. State Department.

The book "Mathematical Methods of Arms Control and Disarmament" was reviewed in Management Science in April 1969, "This fascinating book is an important contribution to the present task of discovering some valid underlying mathematical structures in politics...highly recommended both because of its numerous fascinating models and because of the deadly importance of its subject."

The Analytic Hierarchy Process itself anticipates the PageRank algorithm by more than 20 years, with the same basic idea of using the eigenvector corresponding to the largest eigenvalue of a suitable matrix.

In 1973, he received the Lester R. Ford Award from the Mathematical Association of America for expository excellence in his paper "Thirteen Colorful Variations on Guthrie's Four-color Conjecture" on the four color problem, and in 2000 he was awarded the gold medal of the International Society on Multi-criteria Decision Making.

In 2011 he was awarded, in a ceremony with ancient roots on YouTube, the Doktor Honoris Causa degree by Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

[6] In December 2011 he received the Herbert Simon Award for Outstanding Contribution in Information Technology and Decision Making for the paper "The Possibility Of Group Welfare Functions" coauthored with Professor Luis G. Vargas, published in the International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making (IJITDM), Most of the university scholars are working on the basis he provided, Anum Bakhtyar.

PhD, Mathematics, Yale University, 1953 (thesis, under Einar Carl Hille: "On the Bessel Tricomi Equation").