# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/herbert-a-simon
# Generated: 2026-09-01T04:58:47.871Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/herbert-a-simon"
name: "Herbert A. Simon"
slug: "herbert-a-simon"
description: "He cracked the code on how humans actually decide — not as perfect calculators, but as creatures settling for \"good enough\" under pressure. That insight, \"bounded rationality,\" won him a Nobel and reshaped economics, AI, and management in one stroke."
tagline: "American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist (1916–2001)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Herbert_Simon%2C_RIT_NandE_Vol13Num11_1981_Mar19_Complete.jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
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  isoCode: "US"
category:
  name: "Academics"
  slug: "academics"
profileType:
  name: "Academic"
  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1916-06-15"
deathDate: "2001-02-09"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
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  momentum:             15.23419501133787
  historical:           24.724212
  currentAttention:     4.642857142857143
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "RISING"
ranks:
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  country:  null
  category: null
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born June 15, 1916, Simon spent most of his career at Carnegie Mellon from 1949 until his death in 2001, helping establish one of the world's first computer science departments. His core obsession was decision-making inside organizations, which led him to reject the fantasy of rational actors and argue instead that people "satisfice" — seek workable solutions within limits. The theory earned him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978. Three years earlier, he and Allen Newell had shared the Turing Award for pioneering artificial intelligence and information processing. Along the way he analyzed the architecture of complexity and proposed mechanisms behind power law distributions, stitching together cognitive science, public administration, and complex systems into a single interdisciplinary lens. He died February 9, 2001.