Shining Notes: The Father of Fuzzy Logic... The pride of my nation

Today I decided to write in my blog about famous people from my country. And the name of Lotfi Zadeh came firstly to my mind... May be this name does not tell you so many things... However, I think it can be interesting for you to know about one of the most genius people in our world for now. I feel proud of him... As this great man is from my motherland - AZERBAIJAN. In this post i will attempt to give you some may be very little information about the Father of Fuzzy Logic... As to give comprehensive information about him can take couple of days.

Lotfi Aliaskerzadeh was born on 4th of February in 1921 in Baku. His father was an Iranian Azerbaijani from Ardabil and his mother was a Russian Jewish. During the time when they lived in Baku, he attended elementary school. Later on he said this school had a significant and long-lasting influence on his thinking and his way of looking at things. When he was just ten years old, his family moved to Tehran. In this city, he studied in Alborz college which was a missionary school. This school played an important role in the future of little Zadeh, which set up desire to live in the United States. Moreover, in this school he met his future wife Fay with whom he has 2 children (son- Norman and daughter- Stella) Afterwards, he graduated from University of Tehran with a degree in electrical engineering. Due to World War II, at that year only three students graduated with that degree and our Zadeh was one of them.

During the war, he finally decided to move to US... and in 1944, he entered MIT and after two years he graduated with a MS degree of electrical engineering. In 1949, the person with full of interest to science, took his Ph.D from Columbia University where he taught as well. During the years 1950-1959, he was a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University.

PhD Graduation, Columbia University, New York 1949

Afterwards, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at UC Berkeley in 1959 and served as its Chair from 1963 to 1968. At that time he already started to publish his work on fuzzy set theory. And finally in 1973, he proposed his theory of fuzzy logic. It was absolutely new way of thinking and became a bright example for modern science. It assists to study objects about which sensory organs can or cannot transfer information to the brain. Professor Lotfi Zadeh describes it in this quotation:

“We are at the crossroads politics, philosophy, sociology, theology and conflict resolution. of two revolutions. The first is the information revolution. This revolution created the international computer network, the Internet. The second revolution is the intelligent systems revolution. This revolution has created intelligent robots, intelligent control systems and fuzzy systems. These are all the fruit of fuzzy logic.”

Fuzzy Logic played a key role and brought fundamental changes in many fields such as biomedicine, finances, geography, ecology, nuclear science, stock market analysis and etc. It is broadly applied to Japanese electronics.

Interesting facts

As of October 2011, Zadeh has had around 950,000 Google scholar citations.