Herbert Alexander Simon is the only person to have received both the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and the Turing Award in Computer Science. He held that observing behavior before producing a theory was indispensable, and introduced novel concepts to pursue the quest to put observation first. Some of these concepts have become household terms, with bounded rationality probably the best known. Another term he coined was satisficing. This chapter acts as an introduction to Herbert Simon and the rest of the book. In keeping with Simon’s spirit to bring something new to the table, the contributors to this book were asked to rethink or speculate about Simon’s work in relation to their own work. The result is a prism providing a spectrum of Simon’s work and offering the reader a glimpse into how their own ideas can be seen though a Simonian lens.
