Herbert Simon

Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was an American political scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science and sociology and was a professor, most notably, at Carnegie Mellon University. With almost a thousand, often very highly cited publications, he is one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century. Simon was not only a polymath, but a truly innovative thinker. He was among the founding fathers of several of today's most important scientific domains, including artificial Intelligence, information processing, decision-making, problem-solving, attention economics, organization theory, complex systems, and computer simulation of scientific discovery. He coined the terms bounded rationality and satisficing, and was the first to analyze the architecture of complexity and to propose a preferential attachment mechanism to explain... full article at wikipedia