Lotfi Asker Zadeh

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A. Lotfizadeh in 2004

Ali Asghar Lotfizadeh (born February 4, 1921) is a mathematician and computer scientist, and a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

He was born in Tabriz, Iran as Ali Asghar Lotfizadeh (or Askar Lotfizadeh), to a Russian Jewish mother and an Iranian Muslim father (from Tabriz, center of East Azarbaijan province of Iran), grew up in Iran, studied at Alborz High School and University of Tehran, and moved to the United States in 1944. He received an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1946, and a PhD in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1949, where he taught for ten years, 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 set in 1965 in which he detailed the mathematics of fuzzy set theory. In 1973 he proposed his theory of fuzzy logic.

Lotfi 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]

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.

Plato laid the foundation of what is now known as fuzzy logic indicating that there was a third region beyond true and 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.

Lotfi 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.

Lotfi Zadeh (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.

[edit] Awards

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, Lotfi Zadeh has received the following awards.

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 (BT) 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.

[edit] References

Aristotle : Metaphysics, Chapter 7.

Lotfi 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.