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. His students included Amos Tversky, Robyn Dawes, and Baruch Fischhoff, 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. The development of scaling theory by Louis Guttman and Clyde Coombs has been recognized by Science (journal), Science 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