Today in 1916, Herbert A. Simon was born.
Working in a number of fields, from political science to psychology to operations research and statistics, Simon won (with Alan Newell) the 1975 Turing Award for “basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing,” and the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics “for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations.”
Simon was present at the birth of the new field of “artificial intelligence,” surprising the participants in the 1956 Dartmouth workshop with the first AI program, the Logic Theorist, which eventually would prove 38 of the first 52 theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica.
Simon predicted in 1965 that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."