The Sciences of the Artificial by Herbert Simon

Just to give some more context about Herbert Simon, he's the only person who has won the Nobel Prize in Economics (yeah yeah, memorial prize) as well as the Turing Award, an accomplishment that is unlikely to ever happen again. At Carnegie Mellon University, he started as a faculty in what became the Tepper School of Business, later joined the Department of Psychology, helped found the field of Artificial Intelligence, and helped found CMU's School of Computer Science, all in one lifetime. All of these different schools and departments claim him as one of their own.

His influence at CMU is rather profound. Some current faculty took courses under him, and in faculty meetings some faculty will still talk about his ideas and his philosophy as a guiding light for how departments should be run. I've joked with younger faculty that you can win any argument here at CMU by quoting Herb Simon.

My own department, the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, was founded many years before I joined. I've been told that he helped provide intellectual air cover for it, since at the time some people felt that computer science should only be about the study of computers, and thus exclude people + computers. But when someone with a Nobel Prize and a Turing Award says "hey, this looks important, we should do more here", people will listen.

I love this book. I read it 20 years ago as a college freshman and it had a huge impact on my vision of the world and how intelligence is not some innate, isolated property but a matter of an individual coupled and coordinating with an environment.

The writing is, to boot, beautiful. I think of the book at least once or twice a year, fondly.

I love this book. It gave me confidence in seeing Computer Science as a real "Science," rather than being a field of Engineering dressed up in Science language in order to play academic political games.

Simon was a polymath: PhD in political science, Nobel Prize-winner in economics, Turing award winner, leading scholar in AI, business management (iirc), etc.

Who are today's Herbert Simons? I don't mean people who match his fields of study exactly, but polymaths who are leading scholars across different fields.

This is a really insightful book that I’d recommend to anyone in STEM with an academic inclination (not necessarily an academic but someone who likes reading big idea nonfiction book)

Another great read by Simon: "The Architecture of Complexity"