Clyde Coombs

Clyde Hamilton Coombs (July 22, 1912 – February 4, 1988) was an American psychologist specializing in the field of mathematical psychology. He devised a voting system, that was hence named Coombs' method.

Education and career Coombs was born in New Jersey but spent most of his childhood in California. He studied at Santa Barbara State College (later University of California, Santa Barbara), the continued his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.

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, Robyn Dawes, and Amos Tversky was a must for Michigan graduate students in Mathematical and Experimental Psychology.

Honors and awards In 1959, Coombs 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 as one of 62 major advances in the social sciences in the period 1900–1965