Short answers, pulled from the story.
Allen Newell (the 19th of March 1927 - the 19th of July 1992) was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and Carnegie Mellon University. He co-created the Logic Theorist (1956) and the General Problem Solver (1957), two of the earliest AI programs, and invented list processing and means-ends analysis as foundational AI techniques.
The Logic Theorist, completed in 1956, is widely regarded as the first true artificial intelligence program. It was created by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and programmer J. C. Shaw, and was presented at the Dartmouth conference of 1956, now considered the birth of artificial intelligence as a field.
Yes. Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon were awarded the ACM Turing Award in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.
The physical symbol systems hypothesis is the philosophical assertion that all intelligent behavior can be reduced to the kind of symbol manipulation demonstrated by Newell and Simon's programs. It was developed alongside their work on the General Problem Solver and became a central, controversial claim in cognitive science.
Soar is a cognitive architecture developed by Allen Newell as the basis for his unified theory of cognition, published in 1990. It was designed to model all aspects of human cognition within a single computational framework. Newell continued working on its improvement until his death in 1992.
Newell completed his bachelor's degree in physics at Stanford in 1949, studied mathematics at Princeton from 1949 to 1950, then joined the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica in 1950. He later earned his PhD from what is now the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon, where he spent most of his career.