Thomas L. Saaty

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Thomas L. Saaty (July 18, 1926 – August 14, 2017)^[1] was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught 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. Later on, he generalized the mathematics of the ANP to the Neural Network Process (NNP) with application to neural firing and synthesis but none of them gain such popularity as AHP.

He died on the 14th of August 2017 after a year-long battle with cancer.^[2]

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.