Thomas L. Saaty was a groundbreaking mathematician whose theories on strategic decision-making and resource allocation have been applied in fields ranging from the U.S. military to nuclear waste to professional sports.
As a distinguished professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School of Business, Mr. Saaty has more than 97,000 citations in Google Scholar, a search engine for scholarly material.
The government of Poland gave Mr. Saaty a national award after its use of his theory for making decisions resulted in the country initially not joining the European Union.
Mr. Saaty had a well-earned reputation for impatience and an intolerance for institutional protocol.
And Mr. Saaty loved telling jokes, so much so that he self-published 20 books of jokes and was renowned for causing massive blushing with his off-color cracks at Thanksgiving dinner.
Mr. Saaty, 91, of Shadyside, who taught classes at the university through June, died of cancer Monday.
Arjang Assad, dean of the Katz school, said Mr. Saaty was recognized around the world for his Analytical Hierarchy Process, which provides a framework for assigning a value or importance to all aspects of a situation and then ranking those aspects to reach a conclusion.
The decision-making process is used in government, industry and sports decisions — such as which baseball or football players to draft — around the world, especially since his sons have developed computer software to make the principles easily available. But it also can be used to help make everyday decisions such as which car to buy, neighborhood to live in or university to attend.
Mr. Assad, who works in a similar field, said he was aware of Mr. Saaty’s work for 25 years and knew many of Mr. Saaty’s colleagues before he was named dean at Pitt two years ago. Mr. Saaty had the reputation of being a blunt speaker who could be a bit cantankerous, Mr. Assad said, but that’s not how Mr. Saaty treated him.
“When I got here, he was the first one to take me around the city and show me around — just a regular guy that way,” Mr. Assad said. “I was almost taken aback because that wasn’t what I had expected. I became very friendly with him as a result.”
Mr. Saaty concentrated on “ideas and teaching” late into his career and, despite being treated for cancer, refused an offer to be relieved from teaching two courses in June, one on decision making and one on creativity, the dean said. He had “an extremely curious mind” and wasn’t afraid to defend his position on issues.
“Tom was passionate in his beliefs,” Mr. Assad said. “When he claimed he was right, he was basing it on looking at an issue from all sides.”
“I don’t think I ran into anybody as smart or as close to a genius as Tom Saaty,” said H.J. Zoffer, the former Katz dean who brought Mr. Saaty to Pitt. “I would say he was the most memorable character I’ve met in all my 63 years at the university.”
Mr. Saaty’s wife, Rozann, and son, John, said he saw the need for his groundbreaking theory when he worked for the federal Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the 1960s. As an adviser to U.S. negotiators in nuclear disarmament talks with Russia in the 1960s, Mr. Saaty became frustrated during meetings in Switzerland that negotiators for each side weren’t taking all elements of the issue into consideration.
Mr. Saaty was replaced when the Nixon administration came into office and went on to teach at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he used the Switzerland experience to develop his decision-making theory. He came to Pitt in 1979.
Mr. Saaty’s theory was so respected that he would draw crowds of hundreds when he spoke in foreign countries. Students from around the world would come to Pitt to learn under him, and some stayed at his Shadyside house during their studies.
Mrs. Saaty, also a mathematician, met her future husband in 1963 when she attended an intense, eight-hours-a-day class he taught during the summer at the University of California. Occasionally he would tell jokes “to relieve the boredom” of the long days, she said, something that would carry through his life.
John Saaty, of Arlington, Va., said his father’s curiosity enabled him to have encounters with foreign leaders, among others.
For example, after he wrote a paper critical of apartheid policies in South Africa in the 1980s, the government there invited him to speak to 300 officials in Sun City. After listening to his concerns, his son said, the leaders asked him to work with them on solutions.
Mr. Saaty almost always followed his straightforward pattern, whether it was telling communist leaders in China in the 1980s what was wrong with their form of government or firing off crude jokes at holiday dinners.
“He didn’t have a filter between his brain and his mouth,” his son said. “He’d say off-color things and just get a hall pass because people knew that’s just how he was. His whole thing was to get people out of their comfort zone.”
Mrs. Saaty said she will continue the work of the Creative Decisions Foundation, which the couple started in 1996 to familiarize people around the world with decision-making techniques.It also holds a convention every two years of the International Society of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, which draws several hundred people.
Mr. Saaty also is survived by two other sons, Daniel of Falls Church, Va., and Michael of Tempe, Ariz.; daughters Emily Hacker of Haddonfield, N.J., and Linda Holker of Charlottesville, Va.; 10 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
There will be no funeral but the family may hold a memorial event in the future. Instead of flowers or donations, Mr. Saaty asked for people to “carry on the legacy of his work in their coursework and research.”
Ed Blazina: eblazina@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1470 or on Twitter @EdBlazina.
First Published: August 20, 2017, 4:05 a.m.
