Models Life by Simon Herbert, Signed (1 results)

First edition of this candid and intellectually inventive autobiography by the Nobel Prize-winning economist and pioneer of artificial intelligence. Octavo, original publisher's half cloth, illustrated. Signed and dated by the author in the year of publication, "Herbert A. Simon May 5, 1991." Near fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Janet Halverson. Published in 1991, Models of My Life is Herbert Simon's refreshingly innovative autobiography, in which the Nobel laureate turns the methods of his own science upon himself and observes Herbert Simon as an object for scientific inquiry. The principal architect of the field of artificial intelligence, Simon was a polymath who applied the metaphor of a decision-making maze to human cognition, management science, economics, and politics, winning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 for his theory of bounded rationality. Rather than a dry, rationalist exercise, this traipse through the branching paths of his personal labyrinth turns out to be a quirky, soul-baring self-analysis. In the early chapters on his introspective Milwaukee childhood he refers to himself in the third person as "the boy," and he is equally objective in discussing his 1930s flirtation with political radicalism, his half-century-long marriage to Dorothea, and the politics of scientific infighting at Carnegie Mellon and elsewhere. The result is a disarming self-portrait by a gifted writer who believes that the real self is an illusion and that one's life need not have a unifying thread - an idea given form in the book's controlling image of the maze, whose value lies not in arriving at a single destination but in the choices made at each branching point along the way. Few autobiographies by major twentieth-century scientists have so successfully fused the rigor of their author's discipline with the candor of genuine introspection.