Early studies
Allen Newell completed his Bachelor's degree in physics from Stanford in 1949. He was a graduate student at Princeton University during 1949-1950, where he studied mathematics. Due to his early exposure to a new field known as game theory and the experiences from the study of mathematics, he was convinced that he would prefer "a combination of experimental and theoretical research to pure mathematics".
Artificial intelligence
In September 1954, Allen Newell enrolled in a seminar where Oliver Selfridge "described a running computer program that learned to recognize letters and other patterns". This was when Allen came to believe that systems may be created and contain intelligence and have the ability to adapt. With this in mind, Allen, after a couple months, wrote in 1955 The Chess Machine: An Example of Dealing with a Complex Task by Adaptation, which "outlined an imaginative design for a computer program to play chess in humanoid fashion". They presented the program at the Dartmouth conference of 1956, an informal gathering of researchers who were interested in simulating intelligence with machines. The conference, now widely considered the "birth of artificial intelligence",was enormously influential and those who attended became the leaders of AI research for the next two decades, Allen Newell included.
Later achievements
Allen Newell and Simon formed a lasting partnership. They founded an artificial intelligence laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University and produced a series of important programs and theoretical insights throughout the late fifties and sixties. This work included the General Problem Solver. Allen Newell is work culminated in the development of a cognitive architecture known as Soar and his unified theory of cognition, published in 1990, but their improvement was the objective of his efforts up to his death.
ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award
Was named in his honor. The Award for Research Excellence of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science was also named in his honor.