Thomas Saaty

Thomas L. Saaty is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. He is the inventor, architect, and primary theoretician of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a decision-making framework used for large-scale, multiparty, multi-criteria decision analysis, and of the Analytic Network Process (ANP), its generalization to decisions with dependence and feedback. More recently he generalized the mathematics of the ANP to the Neural Network Process (NNP) with application to neural firing and synthesis.

Prior to coming to the University of Pittsburgh, Saaty was professor of statistics and operations research at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (1969–79). Before that, he spent fifteen years working for U.S. government agencies and for companies doing government-sponsored research. His employers at that time included the Operations Evaluation Group of MIT at the Pentagon, the Office of Naval Research, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the U.S. State Department.

Saaty 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 more than 35 books and 350 papers on mathematics, operations research, and decision making. Their subjects include graph theory and its applications, nonlinear mathematics, analytical planning, and game theory and conflict resolution. According to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, he has had 14 doctoral students. Saaty himself was a student of Einar Hille at Yale.