Lotfi Asker Zadeh was born on February 4, 1921 in Baku, Azerbaijan as Lotfi Aliaskerzadeh to a Jewish mother and Muslim father. 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.

Aristotle introduced the Laws of Thought which consisted of three fundamental laws -

• principle of identity
• law of the excluded middle
• law of contradiction

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. In other words, p cannot be both p and not p. 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's latest work includes Computing with Words and Perceptions.

Lotfi Zadeh was born to an Azerbaijani father and Russian mother, grew up in Iran, studied at Alborz High School and Tehran University, and moved to the United States in 1944. He has taught at Berkeley since 1959.

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.

External link

• Home page