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Lotfi A. Zadeh

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Lotfali Askar Zadeh
File:Lotfi A. Zadeh(2004).jpg
Lotfali A. Zadeh in 2004
Born (1921-02-04) February 4, 1921 (age 103)
Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, USSR
NationalityIranian American
Alma materColumbia University
Known forFounder of Fuzzy Mathematics,
fuzzy set theory, and fuzzy logic
AwardsIEEE Medal of Honor
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsU.C. Berkeley

Lotfali Askar Zadeh (Template:PerB, Template:Lang-az), born February 4, 1921) is a mathematician and computer scientist, and a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Biography

He was born in Baku, of an Azeri father on assignment as a journalist from Iran, and a Russian-Jewish mother who was a pediatrician.[1] However at the age of ten, when Joseph Stalin introduced collectivization of farms throughout the Soviet Union, Zadeh family moved back to Iran, his father's homeland. Zadeh grew up in Iran, studied at Alborz High School. After high school, he sat for the national university exams and placed second in the entire country. In 1942, he was graduated from the University of Tehran in electrical engineering (Fanni), and moved to the United States in 1944. He received an MS degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1946, and a PhD in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1949.

He taught for ten years at Columbia University and was promoted to full professor in 1957. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley since 1959. He published his seminal work on fuzzy sets in 1965 in which he detailed the mathematics of fuzzy set theory. In 1973 he proposed his theory of fuzzy logic.

Zadeh is married to Fay Zadeh and has two children, Stella Zadeh and Norman Zadeh.

Awards

In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1995 "For pioneering development of fuzzy logic and its many diverse applications."

Zadeh has a long list of achievements, but since 2003, Zadeh has received the following awards.

  • In 1993 Azerbaijan bestowed him an honorary Professorship from the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy.
  • Outstanding Contribution Award, Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), Halifax, Canada, 2003.
  • Wall of Fame, Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum (HNF), Paderborn, Germany, 2004.
  • Civitate Honoris Causa, Budapest Tech Polytechnical Institution, Budapest, Hungary; Sept. 4, 2004.
  • Doctor Honoris Causa, Muroran Institute of Technology, Muroran, Japan; Oct. 29, 2004.
  • Doctor Honoris Causa, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China; Nov. 9, 2004.
  • V. Kaufmann Prize and Gold Medal, International Association for Fuzzy-Set Management and Economy (SIGEF), Barcelona, Spain, Nov. 15, 2004.
  • Foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2005.
  • Nicolaus Copernicus Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences, 2005.
  • J. Keith Brimacombe IPMM Award in recognition of his development of fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic, 2005.
  • Doctor Honoris Causa, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain; Jan. 29, 2007.
  • Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award
  • Doctor Honoris Causa, Ryerson University, Toronto , Ontario, Canada; June 10th 2008.

Work

Zadeh is noted to "quick(ly) shrug off nationalism, insisting there are much deeper issues in life", where he himself is quoted stating: "The question really isn't whether I'm American, Russian, Iranian, Azerbaijani, or anything else. I've been shaped by all these people and cultures and I feel quite comfortable among all of them."[1]

Zadeh also notes in the same interview: "Obstinacy and tenacity. Not being afraid to get embroiled in controversy. That's very much a Turkish tradition. That's part of my character, too. I can be very stubborn. That's probably been beneficial for the development of Fuzzy Logic." [2]

Fuzzy sets and systems

Aristotle introduced the laws of thought, which consisted of three fundamental laws:

The law of the excluded middle states that for all propositions p, either p or ~p must be true, there being no middle true proposition between them. This should not be confused with the principle of bivalence, which states that either p must be true or false.

It was Jan Łukasiewicz who first proposed a systematic alternative to the bi-valued logic of Aristotle and described the 3-valued logic, with the third value being Possible. Zadeh, in his theory of fuzzy logic, proposed the making of the membership function operate over the range of real numbers [0,1]. He proposed new operations for the calculus of logic and showed that fuzzy logic was a generalisation of classical logic.

Other contributions

Because of the importance of the retraction/relaxation of Aristotelian logic, which opens up applicability of rational methods to the majority of practical situations without dichotomous truth values, Zadeh is one of the most referenced authors in the fields of applied maths and the computer sciences among others but his contributions are not limited to fuzzy sets and systems.

Askar Zadeh is also credited, along with John R. Ragazzini, in 1952, to have pioneered the development of the z-transform method in discrete time signal processing and analysis. These methods are now standard in digital signal processing, digital control, and other discrete-time systems used in industry and research.

Zadeh's latest work includes computing with words and perceptions. His recent papers include From Search Engines to Question-Answering Systems—The Role of Fuzzy Logic, Progress in Informatics, No. 1, 1-3, 2005; and Toward a Generalized Theory of Uncertainty (GTU)—An Outline, Information Sciences, Elsevier, Vol. 172, 1-40, 2005.

Publications

Zadeh wrote several articles. A selection:

  • 1965. Fuzzy sets. Information and Control. 1965; 8: 338–353.
  • 1965. Fuzzy sets and systems. In: Fox J, editor. System Theory. Brooklyn, NY: Polytechnic Press, 1965: 29–39.
  • 1972. A fuzzy-set-theoretical interpretation of linguistic hedges. Journal of Cybernetics 1972; 2: 4–34.
  • 1973. Outline of a new approach to the analysis of complex systems and decision processes. IEEE Trans. Systems, Man and Cybernetics, 1973; 3: 28–44.
  • 1974. Fuzzy logic and its application to approximate reasoning. In: Information Processing 74, Proc. IFIP Congr. 1974 (3), pp. 591–594.
  • 1975. Fuzzy logic and approximate reasoning. Synthese, 1975; 30: 407–428.
  • 1975. Calculus of fuzzy restrictions. In: Zadeh LA, Fu KS, Tanaka K, Shimura M, editors. Fuzzy Sets and their Applications to Cognitive and Decision Processes. New York: Academic Press, 1975: 1–39.
  • 1975. The concept of a linguistic variable and its application to approximate reasoning, I-III, Information Sciences 8 (1975) 199–251, 301–357; 9 (1976) 43–80.
About Lotfi Asker Zadeh
  • Fuzzy Sets and Systems. The main journal of the field which contains many contributions by its founder.
  • Aristotle : Metaphysics, Chapter 7.
  • Zadeh : From computing with numbers to computing with words — from manipulation of measurements to manipulation of perceptions in International Journal of Applied Math and Computer Science, pp. 307-324, vol. 12, no. 3, 2002.
  • Fay Zadeh. "My Life and Travels with the Father of Fuzzy Logic". 1998, TSI Press, Albuquerque, NM.

References

  1. ^ "Short Biographical Sketch", Betty Blair, Azerbaijan International, accessed August 19th, 2005
  2. ^ Azerbaijan International. Interview with Zadeh, Creator of Fuzzy Logic

For Zadeh's PhD students see

[[Category:American Jews

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