Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon, a Nobel Prize laureate, was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, psychologist, and computer scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science, sociology, and political science, unified by studies of decision-making. With almost a thousand highly cited publications, he was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. For many years he held the post of Richard King Mellon Professor at...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth15 June 1916
CountryUnited States of America
The simplest scheme of evolution is one that depends on two processes; a generator and a test. The task of the generator is to produce variety, new forms that have not existed previously, whereas the task of the test is to cull out the newly generated forms so that only those that are well fitted to the environment will survive.
Enlightenments, like accidents, happen only to prepared minds.
Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints.
Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
By 1985, machines will be capable of doing any work Man can do.
Learning is any change in a system that produces a more or less permanent change in its capacity for adapting to its environment.
Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.
The world is vast, beautiful, and fascinating, even awe-inspiring - but impersonal. It demands nothing of me, and allows me to demand nothing of it.
Human beings know a lot of things, some of which are true, and apply them. When we like the results, we call it wisdom.
The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the 'hard' sciences so brilliantly successful.
Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.
The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be - how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.
Human knowledge has been changing from the word go and people in certain respects behave more rationally than they did when they didn't have it. They spend less time doing rain dances and more time seeding clouds.
Innovation has a lot to do with your ability to recognise surprising and unusual phenomena.