| Lotfi Asker Zadeh | |
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.jpg) Lotfali A. Zadeh in 2004
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| Born | February 4, 1921 Baku, Azerbaijan SSR |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | Iranian, American |
| Ethnicity | Azeri |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | U.C. Berkeley |
| Alma mater | Columbia University |
| Known for | Founder of Fuzzy Mathematics, fuzzy set theory, and fuzzy logic |
| Notable awards | IEEE Medal of Honor, ACM Fellow |
Lotfali Askar-Zadeh (Azerbaijani: Lütfəli Əsgərzadə, Persian: لطفعلیعسکرزاده, born February 4, 1921), better known as Lotfi A. Zadeh, is a mathematician and computer scientist, and a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley of Iranian Azeri origin.
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Biography
He was born in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, to a Russian Jewish mother (Fanya Koriman) who was a pediatrician, and an Iranian Azerbaijani father from Ardabil who was a journalist on assignment from Iran. [1] However, at the age of ten, when Joseph Stalin introduced collectivization of farms throughout the Soviet Union, the Zadeh family moved to Iran, his father's homeland.
Zadeh grew up in Iran, and 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 graduated from the University of Tehran with a degree 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. [1]
Zadeh taught for ten years at Columbia University, 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.
Zadeh is noted to be "quick to 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, Azarbaijani, or anything else. I've been shaped by all these people and cultures and I feel quite comfortable among all of them."[2]
Zadeh also notes in the same interview from which the above quote is taken: "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."[3]
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, including
- In 1993 Azarbaijan bestowed him an honorary Professorship from the Azarbaijan State Oil Academy.
but the awards Zadeh has received since 2003, include:
- 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 10 2008.
Zadeh's most recent recognition comes from The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Lotfi Zadeh receives the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering for inventing and developing the field of “fuzzy logic,” in which a system applies a quantitative assessment to inherently ambiguous ideas, thus providing a new paradigm to improve artificial intelligence and automated control systems.
Work
Because of the importance of the 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 mathematics and computer science, but – as noted below – his contributions are not limited to fuzzy sets and systems.
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.
Jan Łukasiewicz was the first to propose 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 sets, proposed using a membership function (with a range covering the interval [0,1]) 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.
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.
- 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
- ^ a b Thomson Gale Lotfi Asker Zadeh Biography World of Computer Science
- ^ Betty Blair."Short Biographical Sketch". Azarbaijan International, Winter 1994 (2.4), page 49. Accessed August 19th, 2005.
- ^ Betty Blair. "Interview with Zadeh, Creator of Fuzzy Logic". Azarbaijan International, Winter 1994 (2.4), pages 46–47, 50.
External links
- Oral history interview with Lotfi A. Zadeh, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
- Berkeley Commencement Speech: "Commercialism and Human Values: When You Can't Stop for Lunch" in Azerbaijan International - AZER.com
- Lotfi Zadeh Reflects Upon his Childhood, Azerbaijan International, Winter 1999.
- Academic profile – Berkeley, University of California
- IEEE: Zadeh
- Honorary Chair and Keynote Speaker, ICCCC 2008, A conference dedicated to the Centenary of John Bardeen
For Zadeh's PhD students see
- Lotfi Asker Zadeh at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- 1965 seminal work on Fuzzy Sets
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