Thomas L Saaty was a distinguished decision scientist and mathematician who served as Distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. Born in Mosul, Iraq on July 18, 1926, he received his PhD in Mathematics from Yale University in 1953 under the supervision of Einar Hille. Prior to his appointment at Pittsburgh, he was a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for a decade and previously served for seven years in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the U.S. State Department. His academic journey included postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne under Henri Cartan and encompassed a remarkable career spanning government service, academia, and theoretical innovation.
Saaty pioneered the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a groundbreaking decision-making framework that revolutionized large-scale, multiparty, multi-criteria decision analysis across numerous fields including business, government, and healthcare. He later developed its generalization, the Analytic Network Process (ANP), which accommodates complex decisions with dependence and feedback structures. His rigorous mathematical approach provided systematic methods for quantifying subjective judgments and prioritizing alternatives through pairwise comparisons. The extraordinary impact of AHP can be measured not only through its widespread adoption across more than 100 countries but also through its application to thousands of real-world problems ranging from resource allocation to conflict resolution.
As a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Saaty received numerous prestigious honors including the Impact Prize from INFORMS in 2008 for his seminal contributions to decision science. His work earned him the Gold Medal from the International Society for Multi-criteria Decision Making in 2000 and the Akao Prize from the Quality Function Deployment society in 2007. Throughout his career, he published extensively and mentored generations of scholars who continue to advance decision science methodology. Saaty passed away on August 14, 2017 after a year-long battle with cancer, leaving behind an enduring legacy that continues to shape how complex decisions are made worldwide.
