Degrees
PhD, Mathematics, Yale University, 1953; Post-graduate study, University of Paris, 1952-53; MA, Mathematics, Yale University, 1951; MS, Physics, Catholic University of America, 1949; BA , Columbia Union College, 1948.
Profile
Thomas L. Saaty holds the Chair of University Professor at the Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh. He received his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from Yale University and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Before coming to the University of Pittsburgh he was a professor at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. Before that he worked at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, U.S. State Department, Washington, DC, that negotiated nuclear arms reduction treaties with the Soviets. He has published 37 books and more than 300 papers. He developed the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for decision-making and its generalization to decision-making with dependence and feedback, the Analytic Network Process (ANP), and was awarded the gold medal from the International Society for Multicriteria Decision Making in 2000. In 1998, he was elected a member of the International Academy of Management. He serves on the Board of Advisors of Decision Lens, a company that produces software for decision making and resource allocation based on his Analytic Hierarchy Process and Analytic Network Process.
He is the architect of the decision theory, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and its generalization to decisions with dependence and feedback, the Analytic Network Process (ANP). The essential feature of the AHP/ANP is to capture the intensities of the importance, preference or likelihood of the dominance of influences of elements in a decision situation in a series of pairwise comparison judgments that lead to priorities for the elements. These priorities are then synthesized throughout the hierarchical or network structure to give the best overall outcome. It provides a numerical way to use strength of feeling to derive strength of influence that leads to valid priorities throughout the decision structure and ultimately to the most likely or most preferred outcome. The pairwise comparison process allows for inconsistency and provides a way to measure it and to improve it by changing judgments. Perhaps most significantly, it makes it possible for different people to provide different judgments and then combines these judgments in a mathematically founded way to arrive at a group judgment.
He has published numerous articles and more than 12 books on these subjects (see www.rwspublications.com). His non-technical book on the AHP, Decision Making for Leaders, has been translated to more than 10 languages. His book, The Brain: Unraveling the Mystery of How It Works, which generalizes the ANP further to neural firing and synthesis, appeared in the year 2000. He is currently writing a book that extends his mathematical multicriteria decision-making theory to an analysis of the consequences of response to influences of natural laws that he believes gives rise to life forms; other current works are about how to synthesize group decisions and societal influences. He has also been involved in the development of the Super Decisions software that implements decision making with the ANP. Its principal construct is a matrix of matrices, known as the supermatrix. For more information about the software see www.superdecisions.com.
The AHP is used in both individual and group decision-making by business, industry, and governments and is particularly applicable to complex large-scale multiparty multicriteria decision problems. The ANP has been applied to a variety of decisions involving benefits, costs, opportunities, and risks and is particularly useful in predicting outcomes as shown in nearly a hundred examples in his books, The Encyclicon, a Dictionary of Applications of Decision Making with Dependence and Feedback based on the Analytic Network Process (RWS Publications), coauthored with Mujgan Ozdemir and Decision Making with the Analytic Network Process (Springer’s International Series), coauthored with Luis Vargas. At the Katz School he teaches Decision Making in Complex Environments, using both the AHP and the ANP and Creativity and Problem Solving.
He has made contributions in the fields of operations research (parametric linear programming, epidemics and the spread of biological agents, queuing theory, and more generally behavioral mathematics as it relates to operations). He also made contributions in arms control and disarmament, writing a book on mathematical models in that field, and in urban design, where he coauthored the book Compact City with George B. Dantzig (translated to Russian and Japanese). He has written books and articles in graph theory and its applications, nonlinear mathematics (two volumes now published by Dover Publications), analytical planning, and game theory and conflict resolution. He is the winner of the L.R. Ford prize in mathematics for an extensive paper on a problem in mathematics that was unsolved for over one hundred years, "Thirteen Colorful Variations on Guthrie’s Four Color Conjecture". This paper was later extended into a book, co-authored with Paul Kainen, called "The Four Color Problem", originally published by McGraw Hill, and now by Dover Publications. Soon after the paper was published the problem was solved by three mathematicians exhausting all the possible cases using the computer.
He has consulted for the Ford Motor Company, the governments of Egypt, France, Iran, and the US particularly the military and the Department of State, the Alaska Department of Fisheries, and the Environmental Protection Agency. An International Symposium on the AHP has been established that meets every two to three years. The recent meetings have been: in July of 1999 the Fifth International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (ISAHP V), held in Kobe, Japan; in August of 2001 the Sixth ISAHP was held in Bern, Switzerland; the Seventh ISAHP was held in Bali, Indonesia, in 2003; the Eighth ISAHP in Hawaii in 2005; and the Ninth ISAHP in Chile, 2007.
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Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales de España
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