Early Life and Education
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. Arthur, an inventor who was granted "several dozen patents", was also an independent patent attorney. Herbert's mother, Edna Marguerite Merkel, was an accomplished pianist whose ancestors had come from Prague and Cologne. Herbert's European ancestors had been piano makers, goldsmiths, and vintners. Simon's father was Jewish and his mother came from a family of Jewish, Lutheran, and Catholic backgrounds.
Herbert Simon was educated as a child in the public school system in Milwaukee where he developed an interest in science. He found schoolwork to be interesting but rather 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. 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 and Charles Edward Merriam.
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. 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 at the University was Henry Schultz who was an econometrician and mathematical economist. After enrolling in a course on "Measuring Municipal Governments," Simon was invited to be a research assistant for Clarence Ridley, with whom he coauthored the book 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.
Read more about this topic: Herbert A. Simon
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“The Heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atmosphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale. Or dangerously higher.”
—Richard Blake, and William Cameron Menzies. Narrator, Invaders from Mars, at the opening of the movie (1953)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)