Thomas L. Saaty
Thomas L. Saaty is an American mathematician serving as University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business & College of Business Administration. He is the inventor, architect, and primary theoretician of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a decision-making framework used by business, industry and governments for complex, large-scale, multiparty, multicriteria, decision problems, and of the Analytic Network Process, its generalization to decisions with dependence and feedback.
Dr. Saaty has written over a dozen books on these subjects, plus numerous papers, articles and chapters in books. He has made contributions in the fields of operations research (parametric linear programming, epidemics and the spread of biological agents, queuing theory, and behavioral mathematics as it relates to operations), arms control and disarmament, and urban design. He has written books and articles in graph theory and its applications, nonlinear mathematics, analytical planning, and game theory and conflict resolution.
Among other honors, Saaty has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (2005), the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales (National Academy of Sciences, Spain, 1971), and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1956). In 1973, he received the Lester R. Ford award from the Mathematical Association of America for his work on the four color problem, and in 2000 he was awarded the gold medal for work on decision making by the International Society on Multi-criteria Decision Making. He is the 2007 recipient of the Akao Prize of the QFD Institute.
Prior to coming to the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Saaty was a professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania for ten years and before that spent seven years in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the U.S. State Department.
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.