Herbert A. Simon (1916-2001)
Filed under the name Herbert · February 22, 2026
Herbert A. Simon won a Nobel Prize in economics and also helped pioneer artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, which is the kind of career that spans two entirely different fields well enough to matter permanently in both, a range I find genuinely impressive given how much specialization most careers demand these days. I use AI tools for scheduling and social media captions at the bakery, in a very small, practical way, so it's strange and a little humbling to read about someone who was literally there at the actual beginning of the field, decades before it touched something as ordinary as my Instagram captions. There's something almost bakery-adjacent about combining two disciplines that people assume don't belong together, the way I've spent years combining my two grandmothers' completely different culinary traditions into recipes that shouldn't work on paper and somehow do. Simon apparently did that at a much higher level, blending economics and cognitive science into something new that neither field could've produced alone.