Herbert A. Simon was born in New York City on August 5, 1927, and grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, New York. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Brooklyn College in 1946 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950
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He taught at Carnegie Institute of Technology (1948–51) and The Johns Hopkins University (1951–56). From 1956 to 1957 he was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for research in mathematical logic. In 1958 Simon joined the faculty of Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) as an assistant professor of mathematics and computer science.
He became a full professor in 1965 and retired in 1986. From 1961 to 1965 he was also a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Engineering, where he worked on information theory with Richard Hamming. In 1965 Simon joined IBM Research as a principal researcher working on algorithmic design theory.
Since 1986 he has been a Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University.