Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 - February 9, 2001) was an American economist and political scientist whose primary interest was decision-making within organizations and is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 and the Turing Award in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science. He was at Carnegie Mellon University for most of his career, from 1949 to 2001.

Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916. His father, Arthur Simon (1881-1948), was an electrical engineer who had come to the United States from Germany in 1903 after earning his engineering degree from the Technische Hochschule of Darmstadt. An inventor who was granted "several dozen patents", his father also was an independent patent attorney. His mother, Edna Marguerite Merkel, was an accomplished pianist whose ancestors had come from Prague and Cologne. His European ancestors had been piano makers, goldsmiths, and vintners. Simon's father was Jewish and his mother came from a family with Jewish, Lutheran, and Catholic backgrounds. Simon called himself an atheist.  Simon was educated in the Milwaukee public school system, where he developed an interest in science. He found schoolwork to be interesting and easy. Unlike many children, Simon was exposed to the idea that human behavior could be studied scientifically at a relatively young age due to the influence of his mother's younger brother, Harold Merkel, who had studied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under John R. Commons. Through his uncle's books on economics and psychology, Simon discovered the social sciences. Among his earliest influences, Simon has cited Richard Ely's economics textbook, Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, and Henry George's Progress and Poverty. At that time, Simon argued "from conviction, rather than cussedness" in favor of George's controversial "single tax" on land rents.  In 1933, Simon entered the University of Chicago, and following those early influences, he studied the social sciences and mathematics. He was interested in biology, but chose not to study it because of his "color-blindness and awkwardness in the laboratory". He chose instead to focus on political science and economics. His most important mentor was Henry Schultz, an econometrician and mathematical economist. Simon received both his B.A. (1936) and his Ph.D. (1943) in political science, from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Harold Lasswell, Nicholas Rashevsky, Rudolf Carnap, Henry Schultz, and Charles Edward Merriam.  After enrolling in a course on "Measuring Municipal Governments", Simon was invited to be a research assistant for Clarence Ridley, with whom he coauthored Measuring Municipal Activities in 1938. Eventually his studies led him to the field of organizational decision-making, which would become the subject of his doctoral dissertation.

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