Lotfi A. Zadeh

Lotfi Aliasger Zadeh (/ˈzɑːdeɪ/; Azerbaijani: Lütfi Rəhim oğlu Ələsgərzadə; Persian: لطفی علی‌عسکرزاده; 4 February 1921 – 6 September 2017) was a mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, and professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Zadeh is best known for proposing fuzzy mathematics, consisting of several fuzzy-related concepts: fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic, fuzzy algorithms, fuzzy semantics, fuzzy languages, fuzzy control, fuzzy systems, fuzzy probabilities, fuzzy events, and fuzzy information. Zadeh was a founding member of the Eurasian Academy.

Zadeh was born in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, as Lotfi Aliasgerzadeh. His father was Rahim Aleskerzade, an Iranian Muslim Azerbaijani journalist from Ardabil on assignment from Iran, and his mother was Fanya (Feyga) Korenman, a Jewish pediatrician from Odesa, Ukraine, who was an Iranian citizen. 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, which he said "had a significant and long-lasting influence on my thinking and my way of looking at things."

In 1931, when Stalin began agricultural collectivization, and Zadeh was ten, his father moved his family back to Tehran, Iran. Zadeh was enrolled in Alborz High School, a missionary school, where he was educated for the next eight years, and where he met his future wife, Fay (Faina) Zadeh, who said that he was "deeply influenced" by the "extremely decent, fine, honest, and helpful" Presbyterian 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." During this time, Zadeh was awarded several patents.

Zadeh sat for the Iran national university exams and placed third in the nation. 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. 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.

In 1943, Zadeh decided to leave for the United States to continue his education. He travelled to Philadelphia by way of Cairo after months of delay waiting first for the proper papers and later for the right ship to appear.^{[citation needed]} He arrived in mid-1944, lived in New York and worked for an electronic association, and entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a graduate student in September that year. While in the United States, he shortened his family name, creating a new middle name from the part he removed, and was thenceforth known as Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh. He received an MS degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1946.

In 1947, as his parents had settled in New York City, Zadeh went to work as an engineer at Columbia University. Zadeh then applied to Columbia University. 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 and was promoted to full professor in 1957.

The chairman of the electronic engineering department at the University of California, wrote and offered him work. In 1959, Zadeh joined the electrical engineering faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. During his lengthy research career, Zadeh made important scientific contributions in two distinct areas: (1) linear system theory and classical control systems, and (2) fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic, and related science and technology.

Zadeh was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 for Natural Sciences in Applied Mathematics.