Clyde Hamilton Coombs (July 22, 1912 – February 4, 1988) was an American

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how indi ...

specializing in the field of

mathematical psychology Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus character ...

. He devised a voting system, that was hence named

Coombs' method Coombs' method or the Coombs ruleGrofman, Bernard, and Scott L. Feld (2004"If you like the alternative vote (a.k.a. the instant runoff), then you ought to know about the Coombs rule,"''Electoral Studies'' 23:641-59. is a ranked voting system whic ...

. Coombs founded the Mathematical Psychology program at the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

. His students included

Amos Tversky Amos Nathan Tversky ( he, עמוס טברסקי; March 16, 1937 – June 2, 1996) was an Israeli cognitive and mathematical psychologist and a key figure in the discovery of systematic human cognitive bias and handling of risk. Much of his ...

Robyn Dawes Robyn Mason Dawes (July 23, 1936 – December 14, 2010) was an American psychologist who specialized in the field of human judgment. His research interests included human irrationality, human cooperation, intuitive expertise, and the United State ...

, and

Baruch Fischhoff Baruch Fischhoff (born April 21, 1946, Detroit, Michigan) is an American academic who is the Howard Heinz University Professor in the Institute for Politics and Strategy and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon Univ ...

, all important researchers in Decision Sciences. The classic text "An Introduction to Mathematical Psychology," by Coombs, Dawes, and Tversky was a must for Michigan graduate students in Mathematical and Experimental Psychology. In 1959 he was elected as a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

. The development of scaling theory by Louis Guttman and Clyde Coombs has been recognized by

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

as one of 62 major advances in the social sciences in the period 1900-1965Deutsch, K.W., Platt, J. & Sengham, D. (1971). Conditions favoring major advances in social sciences. ''Science '' 05 Feb 1971: Vol. 171, Issue 3970, pp. 450-459. DOI: 10.1126/science.171.3970.450

Selected bibliography

* * Coombs, Clyde H. (1964). ''Theory of data.'' New York, Wiley. (OCoLC)565269224. * Coombs, Clyde H. (1983). ''Psychology and Mathematics: An Essay on Theory.'' Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. * Coombs, Clyde H., Coombs, Lolagene C. & Lingoes, James C. (1978). Stochastic cumulative scales. In S. Shye (Ed.) ''Theory construction and data analysis in the behavioral sciences''. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

References

1912 births 1988 deaths 20th-century American psychologists University of Michigan faculty Fellows of the American Statistical Association American psychologists {{US-psychologist-stub