Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh[5] (/ˈzɑːdeɪ/; Azerbaijani: Lütfəli Rəhim oğlu Ələsgərzadə;[6] Persian: ‫لطفی‬

‫[;علیعسگرزاده‬4] February 4, 1921 – September 6, 2017)[1][2] was a mathematician, computer

scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher and professor
emeritus[7] of computer scienceat the University of California, Berkeley.
Zadeh was best known for proposing fuzzy mathematics consisting of these fuzzy-related
concepts: fuzzy sets,[8] fuzzy logic,[9] fuzzy algorithms,[10]fuzzy semantics,[11] fuzzy
languages,[12] fuzzy control,[13] fuzzy systems,[14] fuzzy probabilities,[15] fuzzy events,[15] and fuzzy
information.[16]
Zadeh was a founding member of the Eurasian Academy.[17]

Life and career[edit]

Zadeh was born in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic,[18] as Lotfi Aliaskerzadeh,[19] to
an Iranian Azerbaijani father from Ardabil, Rahim Aleskerzade, who was a journalist on
assignment from Iran, and a Russian Jewish mother, also an Iranian citizen,[20][21] Fanya
Korenman, who was a pediatrician from Odessa.[22][23] The Soviet government at this time courted
foreign correspondents, and the family lived well while in Baku.[24] Zadeh attended elementary
school for three years there,[24] which he said "had a significant and long-lasting influence on my
thinking and my way of looking at things."[25]
In 1931, when Zadeh was ten years old, his family moved to Tehran in Iran, his father's
homeland. Zadeh was enrolled in Alborz College, which was a Presbyterian missionary school,
where he was educated for the next eight years, and where he met his future wife, Fay.[24] Zadeh
says that he was "deeply influenced" by the "extremely decent, fine, honest and helpful"
missionaries from the United States who ran the college. "To me they represented the best that
you could find in the United States – people from the Midwest with strong roots. They were really
'Good Samaritans' – willing to give of themselves for the benefit of others. So this kind of attitude
influenced me deeply. It also instilled in me a deep desire to live in the United States."[25] During
this time, Zadeh was awarded several patents.[24]
Despite being more fluent in Russian than in Persian, Zadeh sat for the national university exams
and placed third in the entire country.[24] 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, one of only three students in that field to graduate that year, due to the turmoil
created by World War II, when the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran,
whose ruler, Reza Shah, was pro-German. Over 30,000 American soldiers were based there,
and Zadeh worked with his father, who did business with them as a contractor for hardware and
building materials.[26]
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 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a graduate
student later that year.[26] While in the United States, he changed his name to Lotfi Asker
Zadeh.[19]
He received an MS degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1946, and then applied
to Columbia University, as his parents had settled in New York City.[26] Columbia admitted him as
a doctoral student, and offered him an instructorship as well.[26] He received his Ph.D. in electrical
engineering from Columbia in 1949, and became an assistant professor the next year.[23][26]
Zadeh taught for ten years at Columbia, was promoted to Full Professor in 1957, and taught at
the University of California, Berkeley from 1959 on. 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[edit]

Zadeh was called "quick to shrug off nationalism, insisting there are much deeper issues in life",
and was quoted as saying 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."[27] He noted 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."[28] He described himself as "an American, mathematically
oriented, electrical engineer of Iranian descent, born in Russia."[23]
Zadeh was married to Fay Zadeh and had two children, Stella Zadeh and Norman Zada.
Zadeh died in his home in Berkeley, California,[3] on September 6, 2017, at the age of 96.[1][2] He is
buried in the first Alley of Honor in Baku, Azerbaijan, where he was born.[3] His funeral was well
attended by "highly respected people", including the president of Azerbaijan.[29] A month previous
to his death, the University of Tehran had released an erroneous report that Zadeh had died, but
withdrew it several days later.[30]

Work[edit]
According to Google Scholar, as of September 2017, Zadeh's work has been cited about
180,000 times in scholarly works, with the 1965 "Fuzzy Sets" paper receiving about 90,000
citations.[31]

Fuzzy sets and systems[edit]

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).[32]

Other contributions[edit]
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 was an editor of the International Journal of
Computational Cognition.
Zadeh's most recent work included 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[edit]
 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". International Journal of Applied Math and
Computer Science, pp. 307–324, vol. 12, no. 3, 2002.
 2012. Computing With Words. Principal Concepts and Ideas. Berlin: Springer, 2012.
A complete list of publications is on the
website: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/Faculty/zadeh.html