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== Life and career == == Life and career ==
Zadeh was born in ], ],<!--DO NOT ADD "SOVIET UNION" HERE, PLEASE READ FOOTNOTE--><ref>At this time, the ] was an independent republic, created by the ]. It would become part of the ] in March 1922, and then part of the ] in December 1922.</ref> as '''Lotfi Aliaskerzadeh''',<ref name=FL17>McNeil & Freiberger, p.17</ref> to an ] father from ], Rahim Aleskerzade, who was a journalist on assignment from Iran, and a ]n ] mother,<ref> on the JINFO.org website</ref> Fanya Koriman, who was a ].<ref name=bookrags>Gale, Thomson. ''World of Computer Science''</ref> The Soviet government at this time courted foreign correspondents, and the family lived well while in Baku.<ref name=FL18>McNeil & Freiberger, p.18</ref> Zadeh attended elementary school for three years there.<ref name=FL18 /> Zadeh was born in ], ],<!--DO NOT ADD "SOVIET UNION" HERE, PLEASE READ FOOTNOTE--><ref>At this time, the ] was an independent republic, created by the ]. It would become part of the ] in March 1922, and then part of the ] in December 1922.</ref> as '''Lotfi Aliaskerzadeh''',<ref name=FL17>McNeil & Freiberger, p.17</ref> to an ] father from ], Rahim Aleskerzade, who was a journalist on assignment from Iran, and a ]n ] mother,<ref> on the JINFO.org website</ref> Fanya Koriman, who was a ].<ref name=bookrags>Gale, Thomson. ''World of Computer Science''</ref> The Soviet government at this time courted foreign correspondents, and the family lived well while in Baku.<ref name=FL18>McNeil & Freiberger, p.18</ref> Zadeh attended elementary school for three years there.<ref name=FL18 /> According to his recollections, his years of life in Azerbaijan were the most important to him and influenced his entire life and career.<ref> Minute 1:41 of this video: "But I must say that what influenced me more than perhaps anything else, were the 10 years, the first 10 years of my life in Baku. I was there at the time when there was very strong ideological influence everywhere. But one thing which had an impact on me was the fact that in school, what we were taught, was not material things, not trying to make money, not buy XYZ, but have some dedication to society, to culture, to science."</ref>


In 1931, when Zadeh was ten years old, his family moved to ] in ], his father's homeland. Zadeh was enrolled in the American College, which was a ] ], where he was educated for the next eight years, and where he met his future wife, Fay.<ref name=FL18 /> During this time, he was awarded several ]. In 1931, when Zadeh was ten years old, his family moved to ] in ], his father's homeland. Zadeh was enrolled in the American College, which was a ] ], where he was educated for the next eight years, and where he met his future wife, Fay.<ref name=FL18 /> During this time, he was awarded several ].


Despite being more fluent in Russian than in Persian, Zadeh sat for the national university exams and placed third in the entire country.<ref name=FL18 /> As a student, he ranked first in his class in his first two years. In 1942, he graduated from the ] with a degree in ] (Fanni), one of only three students in that field to graduate that year, due to the turmoil created by ], when the Soviet Union invaded Iran &ndash; whose ruler, the ], was pro-German &ndash; and split the administration of the country with the British. Over 30,000 American soldiers were also based there, and Zadeh worked with his father, who did business with them as a contractor for hardware and building materials.<ref name=FL19>McNeil & Freiberger, p.19</ref> Despite being more fluent in Russian than in Persian (he also counts Azerbaijani among languages he knows)<ref></ref>, Zadeh sat for the national university exams and placed third in the entire country.<ref name=FL18 /> As a student, he ranked first in his class in his first two years. In 1942, he graduated from the ] with a degree in ] (Fanni), one of only three students in that field to graduate that year, due to the turmoil created by ], when the Soviet Union invaded Iran &ndash; whose ruler, the ], was pro-German &ndash; and split the administration of the country with the British. Over 30,000 American soldiers were also based there, and Zadeh worked with his father, who did business with them as a contractor for hardware and building materials.<ref name=FL19>McNeil & Freiberger, p.19</ref>


In 1943, Zadeh decided to emigrate to the United States, and traveled to ] by way of ] after months of delay waiting for the proper papers or for the right ship to appear. He arrived in mid-1944, and entered ] as a graduate student later that year.<ref name=FL19 /> While in the United States, he changed his name to Lotfi Asker Zadeh.<ref name=FL17 /> In 1943, Zadeh decided to emigrate to the United States, and traveled to ] by way of ] after months of delay waiting for the proper papers or for the right ship to appear. He arrived in mid-1944, and entered ] as a graduate student later that year.<ref name=FL19 /> While in the United States, he changed his name to Lotfi Asker Zadeh.<ref name=FL17 />

Revision as of 19:48, 5 September 2011

Lotfi A. Zadeh
File:Lotfi A. Zadeh(2004).jpgin 2004
Born (1921-02-04) February 4, 1921 (age 103)
Baku, Azerbaijan SSR
Alma materColumbia University
Known forFounder of fuzzy mathematics,
fuzzy set theory, and fuzzy logic
AwardsIEEE Medal of Honor, ACM Fellow
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics, Electrical Engineering
InstitutionsU.C. Berkeley
Doctoral studentsJoseph Goguen

Lotfali Askar Zadeh (born February 4, 1921), better known as Lotfi A. Zadeh, is a mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Life and career

Zadeh was born in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, as Lotfi Aliaskerzadeh, to an Iranian Azeri father from Ardabil, Rahim Aleskerzade, who was a journalist on assignment from Iran, and a Russian Jewish mother, Fanya Koriman, who was a pediatrician. The Soviet government at this time courted foreign correspondents, and the family lived well while in Baku. Zadeh attended elementary school for three years there. According to his recollections, his years of life in Azerbaijan were the most important to him and influenced his entire life and career.

In 1931, when Zadeh was ten years old, his family moved to Teheran in Iran, his father's homeland. Zadeh was enrolled in the American College, which was a Presbyterian missionary school, where he was educated for the next eight years, and where he met his future wife, Fay. During this time, he was awarded several patents.

Despite being more fluent in Russian than in Persian (he also counts Azerbaijani among languages he knows), Zadeh sat for the national university exams and placed third in the entire country. As a student, he ranked first in his class in his first two years. In 1942, he graduated from the University of Tehran with a degree in electrical engineering (Fanni), one of only three students in that field to graduate that year, due to the turmoil created by World War II, when the Soviet Union invaded Iran – whose ruler, the Shah, was pro-German – and split the administration of the country with the British. Over 30,000 American soldiers were also based there, and Zadeh worked with his father, who did business with them as a contractor for hardware and building materials.

In 1943, Zadeh decided to emigrate to the United States, and traveled to Philadelphia by way of Cairo after months of delay waiting for the proper papers or for the right ship to appear. He arrived in mid-1944, and entered M.I.T. as a graduate student later that year. While in the United States, he changed his name to Lotfi Asker Zadeh.

He received an MS degree in electrical engineering from M.I.T. in 1946, and then applied to Columbia University, as his parents had settled in New York City. Columbia admitted him as a doctoral student, and offered him an instructorship as well. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Columbia in 1949, and became an assistant professor the next year.

Zadeh taught for ten years at Columbia, was promoted to Full Professor in 1957, and 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.

Personal life and beliefs

Zadeh is noted to be "quick to shrug off nationalism, insisting there are much deeper issues in life", and is quoted as stating in an interview: "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." 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." He describes himself as "an American, mathematically oriented, electrical engineer of Iranian descent, born in Russia."

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

Work

Zadeh is one of the most referenced authors in the fields of applied mathematics and computer science.

Fuzzy sets and systems

Zadeh, in his theory of fuzzy sets, proposed using a membership function (with a range covering the interval ) operating on the domain of all possible values. He proposed new operations for the calculus of logic and showed that fuzzy logic was a generalisation of classical and Boolean logic. He also proposed fuzzy numbers as a special case of fuzzy sets, as well as the corresponding rules for consistent mathematical operations (fuzzy arithmetic).

Other contributions

Lotfi Zadeh is also credited, along with John R. Ragazzini, in 1952, with having 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. He is an editor of International Journal of Computational Cognition.

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.

Selected publications

  • 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.
  • 2002. "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.

Awards and honors

Zadeh is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the International Fuzzy Systems Association, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is also a member of the Academies of Science of Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Finland, Korea and Poland and of the International Academy of Systems Studies in Moscow. He has received 24 honorary doctorates.

Awards received by Zadeh include, among many others:

References

Notes
  1. ^ "Lotfi A. Zadeh" faculty page from College of Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley
  2. At this time, the Azerbaijan SSR was an independent republic, created by the Red Army. It would become part of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic in March 1922, and then part of the Soviet Union in December 1922.
  3. ^ McNeil & Freiberger, p.17
  4. "Jews in Computer & Information Science" on the JINFO.org website
  5. ^ Gale, Thomson. Lotfi Asker Zadeh Biography World of Computer Science
  6. ^ McNeil & Freiberger, p.18
  7. Speech by Prof. Lotfi Asker Zadeh at the Azerbaijani-American Forum at the UC Berkeley, December 2007 Minute 1:41 of this video: "But I must say that what influenced me more than perhaps anything else, were the 10 years, the first 10 years of my life in Baku. I was there at the time when there was very strong ideological influence everywhere. But one thing which had an impact on me was the fact that in school, what we were taught, was not material things, not trying to make money, not buy XYZ, but have some dedication to society, to culture, to science."
  8. Prof. Lotfi Asker Zadeh interviewed by BIRLIK publication of the UC Berkeley in 2009
  9. ^ McNeil & Freiberger, p.19
  10. Blair, Betty. "Short Biographical Sketch". Azerbaijan International, Vol. 2:4 (Winter 1994), p. 49.
  11. Blair, Betty. "Interview with Lotfi Zadeh, Creator of Fuzzy Logic". Azerbaijan International, Vol. 2:4 (Winter 1994), pp. 46 ff.
  12. McNeil & Freiberger, passim
  13. "IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Retrieved September 3, 2011 (2011-09-03). {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  14. "IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Retrieved May 29, 2011 (2011-05-29). {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  15. "IEEE Medal of Honor Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Retrieved September 3, 2011 (2011-09-03). {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  16. "AI's Hall of Fame"
Bibliography
  • McNeil, Daniel and Freiberger, Paul. Fuzzy Logic: The discovery of a revolutionary computer technology - and how it is changing our world. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. ISBN 0671738437
Further reading
  • Fuzzy Sets and Systems. The main journal of the field which contains many contributions by its founder.
  • Zadeh, Fay. "My Life and Travels with the Father of Fuzzy Logic". 1998, TSI Press, Albuquerque, NM.
  • Zadeh, Lofti A. "Lotfi Visions", two-part interview with Jack J. Woehr, Dr. Dobb's Journal, July, 1994 (part 1) and August, 1994 (part 2).

External links

Zadeh's PhD students


Articles and topics related to Lotfi A. Zadeh
IEEE Medal of Honor
1976–2000
IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal
AACC Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award
1979–2000
2001–present

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