2000 ACS Award

Herbert A. Simon

The Andrew Carnegie Society is proud to present its first Recognition Award to Herbert A. and Dorothea Pye Simon.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Herbert was educated in political science at the University of Chicago (B.A. 1936, Ph.D. 1943). His dissertation, Administrative Behavior (1947), is one of the most influential books of the 20th century on the theory of organizations in particular, and on the theory of human rationality, in general. He held research and faculty positions at the University of California, Berkeley; Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and from 1949, Carnegie Mellon University, where he was the Richard King Mellon University Professor of Computer Science and Psychology. In 1978, he received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and in 1986, the National Medal of Science.

When the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT) was in the planning stages, Herbert served as a key adviser. He was then asked to become a full professor of administration in the new school as well as chairman of the Department of Industrial Management. Herbert and his colleagues turned their energies into building a new kind of business school, one based on rigorous social research and empirical findings.

At Carnegie Mellon, Herbert continued his extensive research on human decision-making. In the early years, he drew on the work of cognitive psychologists during an era when their work was ignored by behaviorists who reigned supreme. Throughout his career, he drew on the work of mathematicians, logicians, economists, political scientists, philosophers, computer scientists and psychologists, as well as the early contributors to what was to become the cybernetic revolution in the social sciences. In the early 1950s he joined forces with Allen Newell and Cliff Shaw to use the new electronic computers as instruments for modeling the processes of human thinking, so that computer programs became basic formal theories of major cognitive processes. This work with Allen Newell and their faculty colleagues and graduate students continued in the succeeding years at Carnegie Mellon to have major impact on our understanding of human thinking.

The thread of continuity through all his work has been his interest in human decision-making and problem-solving processes, and the implications of these processes for social institutions. For more than 40 years, he had made extensive use of the computer as a tool for both simulating human thinking and augmenting it with artificial intelligence.

Herbert's books included Administrative Behavior, Human Problem Solving jointly with Allen Newell, The Sciences of the Artificial, Scientific Discovery with Pat Langley, Gary Bradshaw and Jan Zythow, and Models of My Life (autobiography).

Dorothea Pye Simon

Born in California and spending most of her childhood in the San Francisco Bay area, Dorothea completed a bachelor's degree in political science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1934. She attended the University of Chicago as a graduate student in political science where she met Herbert A. Simon, also a graduate student. They married on Christmas Day in 1937. At Chicago, Dorothea and Herbert had a lively intellectual and social life with the graduate students of political science and with a miscellaneous group of students interested in the philosophy of science.

Their elder daughter, Katie, was born in 1942, their son, Peter, was born in 1944 and their younger daughter, Barbara, was born in 1946. Dorothea decided to devote her time primarily to her young family. In the autumn of 1949, Herbert was appointed professor of administration in the new Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Tech. The Simon family moved to Pittsburgh, where they bought a large old house just a mile from campus, which was their home for the next 47 years. Dorothea joined a local chapter of the Allegheny County League of Women Voters. A second organization that engaged Dorothea's efforts was the Craig House - Technoma, which became a leading provider in Pittsburgh of educational and psychiatric services to children. For more than 40 years she served on the board of directors and for several years as president. Dorothea's third activity, outside her home, had been with the First Unitarian Church where she had been a member of the board and a very active member.

When the children were completing their schooling and she no longer needed to spend as much time in the home, she began a new career in education. She accepted a research position in the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work produced a new theory of the causes of spelling errors, which was supported by experimental data and by simulation with a computer model. She and Herbert found themselves authors of a joint paper on the theoretical aspects of this project. At this point, she decided to join, as a volunteer, the research group Herbert led at Carnegie Mellon, which was carrying on similar studies involving computer simulation of the processes students use to learn how to solve problems.

This account of Dorothea's activities would be grossly incomplete if it did not say something about the person who did all of these things. "To her, people are not important or unimportant, they are not high or low, they are people, who cohabit this Earth with her," said her husband.

Photos courtesy of University Archives