Models of My Life
Models of My Life is a candid and witty autobiography of Nobel laureate Herbert Simon. He looks at his distinguished and varied career, continually asking himself whether—and how—what he learned as a scientist helps to explain other aspects of his life. A brilliant polymath in an age of increasing specialization, Simon is one of those rare scholars whose work defines fields of inquiry. Crossing disciplinary lines in half a dozen fields, his story encompasses an explosion in the information sciences, the transformation of psychology by the information-processing paradigm, and the use of computer simulation for modeling the behavior of highly complex systems. Models of My Life is also a warm account of his successful marriage and of an unconsummated love affair, letters to his children, columns, a short story, and political and personal intrigue in academe.
"As much as any one person, Herbert A. Simon has shaped the intellectual agenda of the human and social sciences in the second half of the 20th century .... For many readers, Mr. Simon's view of human endeavor, of love and of work, will seem emblematic not of the pre-Freudian rationalism-that-was but a new, sleeker, rationalism-to-be—a rationalism purged of Utopian excess, committed to empirical studies, and wedded to the most modern technology."