Herbert Simon (June 15, 1916 - February 9, 2001) was a researcher in the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, economics and philosophy (sometimes described as a polymath).
He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1916. After earning a PhD in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1942, he had positions at Berkeley and the Illinois Institute of Technology. From 1949 until his death, Simon served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, pioneering the quantitative modeling of human behavior through research in a variety of fields.
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. GPS was possibly the first method of separating problem solving strategy from information about particular problems. Both programs were developed using the Information Processing Language (1956) developed by Newell, Cliff Shaw and Simon.
In 1978 he was awarded The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations". He invented the terms bounded rationality and satisficing.
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