Abstract
This historical note is based on a plenary talk ‘A History of Early Developments in Multiple Criteria Decision Making’, presented by Stanley Zionts at the 21st International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making held in Jyväskylä, Finland, June 2011. It draws heavily on our book, Multiple Criteria Decision Making: From Early History to the 21st Century, published by World Scientific, Singapore, 2011 (Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.) The note summarizes major early developments and contributors of multiple criteria decision making and closely related fields.
This chapter is reprinted with permission from ‘An Early History of Multiple Criteria Decision Making’, Murat Köksalan, Jyrki Wallenius and Stanley Zionts, Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Volume 20, Issue 1–2, 87–94, Copyright © 2013, John Wiley & Sons. DOI: 10.1002/mcda.1481
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Notes
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Saul Gass, private communication.
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Franklin began an autobiography in 1771 and continued in several spurts until 1788. His last writings were of his activities as late as 1757. Interestingly enough, his autobiography was published in French a year after his death as ‘Memoires De La Vie Privee’. It was later translated into English as ‘The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D’.
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De Borda spent most of his life as a military engineer and military marine officer. Five French ships were named Borda in his honor. He also made great contributions to various measurement systems.
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Pareto was born in Paris to an Italian father and French mother. He studied civil engineering and worked as a civil engineer, first for the Italian railways and later for private industry. He began to study economics and sociology in his mid forties. In 1923, shortly before his death, Pareto was nominated to Mussolini’s government, but did not wish to serve.
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Edgeworth, born in Ireland, was a philosopher, politician, economist, statistician and barrister, although he never practiced law or earned his living as a barrister. He was educated by private tutors until he entered a university. He studied ancient and modern languages, and later economics and mathematics. He became an influential person in the development of neoclassical economics. He was the first to apply certain formal mathematical concepts to decision making.
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Cantor was a German mathematician who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and moved with his family to Germany when he was 11 years old. He became an outstanding violinist. His PhD thesis was on number theory. He took a position at the University of Halle, where he spent his entire career, except for a brief early period teaching at a Berlin girl’s school. Although he became a full professor at a young age of 34 years, his work was extremely controversial at the time. He later became very highly regarded, and in 1904, the Royal Society of London awarded Cantor its Sylvester medal, its highest award for work in mathematics for improving natural knowledge.
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Frisch was a pioneer of economics as a modern science. Frisch’s research is very creative. As told by former colleagues, when pursuing a new topic, he would seldom read about what others had carried out. He felt that this would constrain him. Instead, being a religious man, when not being able to solve a problem, he would isolate himself and pray. Frisch was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969.
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Ramsey was born in Cambridge. He was a brilliant mathematician and philosopher, with an interest in logic. It was John Maynard Keynes who urged him to work on problems of economics. Ramsey died from a liver disease at the age of 26 years.
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Von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and is generally regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians in modern history. He has contributed to many fields, including mathematics, computer science and nuclear physics. He joined Princeton University in 1930, and, with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, formed the Institute for Advanced Studies there in 1933.
Morgenstern was born in Germany and grew up in Austria. His PhD was in political science, but he later became a professor of economics. He later joined the faculty at Princeton, worked with John von Neumann, carried out joint research and published their famous book on game theory.
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Nash received two degrees from Carnegie Institute of Technology and a PhD from Princeton. He had a letter of recommendation from his advisor at Carnegie, Richard Duffin that consisted of one sentence, ‘This man is a genius’. He was a schizophrenic prodigy. An Oscar winning film was made about him, on the basis of the best-selling book by Sylvia Nassar ‘A Beautiful Mind’ (2001). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994. Until his death in May 2015 in a taxicab accident, Nash remained active in research in game theory.
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Samuelson wrote a column for Newsweek magazine. One article included Samuelson’s most quoted remark, and a favorite economics joke: ‘To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties’. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126072304261489561.html. Samuelson received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1970 for his many contributions to Neoclassical Economics.
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Allen Newell (1927–1992) and Herbert Simon are widely regarded as the fathers of Artificial Intelligence, a field that has also influenced modern MCDM.
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Herbert Simon’s autobiography Models of My Life, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996, contains an interesting discussion about how Bill Cooper and Herbert Simon (with Lee Bach and Provost Smith) laid the foundations for the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University. They regarded business education (at the time) as a ‘wasteland of vocationalism that needed to be transformed into science-based professionalism, as medicine and engineering…’ As a curiosity, as a professor, Simon did not allow students to take notes; if they did, they did not give him their full attention.
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Köksalan, M., Wallenius, J., Zionts, S. (2016). An Early History of Multiple Criteria Decision Making. In: Greco, S., Ehrgott, M., Figueira, J. (eds) Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis. International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, vol 233. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-3094-4_1
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