Background

Ethnicity: Lofti was a son of an Iranian Azerbaijani father and a Russian Jewish mother.

Lotfi Asker Zadeh was born February 4, 1921, in Baku, a city on the Caspian Sea in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Originally named Lotfi Aliaskerzadeh, he simplified his name to Lotfi Asker Zadeh when he arrived in the United States. His father, Rahim Aliaskerzadeh (Asker), was a correspondent for Iranian newspapers and also an importer-exporter; his mother, Fannie (Fanya) Korenman Aliaskerzadeh (Asker), was a pediatrician. In 1931, when Zadeh was ten years old, his family moved to Tehran in Iran, his father's homeland, where he lived till 1943.

Education

Zadeh was taught in Persian—a language he had to learn after his arrival in Iran—at American College, the Presbyterian missionary school (now Alborz High School). He attended this school for eight years and then took the entrance exams for the University of Tehran, scoring third in the country. As an electrical engineering major, he was first in his class his freshman and sophomore years. However, the disruption of World War II was felt at the university and in the electrical engineering department, which graduated only three students, Zadeh among them, in 1942.

Arriving in the United States in 1944, Zadeh enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which awarded him a Master of Arts degree in electrical engineering in 1946. During his years at MIT, the university was abuzz with excitement over developments in cybernetics, information and communication theory, and advances in computer applications. Zadeh caught the excitement as well and enrolled in the doctoral program at Columbia University, receiving his doctorate in 1949.

During his career, Zadeh has also received 24 honorary doctorates.

Career

During 1942, Zadeh worked with his father supplying construction materials to the U.S. Army in Iran. His contacts with Americans made him decide to move to the United States in 1943.

In 1946, Zadeh was appointed an instructor at Columbia University. Rising from instructor to professor of electrical engineering, he was on staff at Columbia from 1946 to 1959, when he moved on to the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1963 Zadeh was appointed a chair of the electrical engineering department at Berkeley. It was in the following years that he developed the first outlines of the fuzzy theory.

Although the fuzzy theory was enthusiastically received and applied in Japan, China, and several European countries, it was greeted with a great deal of scepticism in the United States. Recently, the fuzzy theory has gained a foothold in the United States as well. The most important application of the theory to be developed in the United States is AT&T’s expert system on a chip.

In 1968 Zadeh took a sabbatical from Berkeley. He spent half a year at IBM and another six months at MIT. When he returned from his leave, he began teaching only computer science courses at Berkeley. Since then he has spent periods as a visiting scientist at the IBM Research Laboratory in San Jose, California, in 1973 and 1978, as a visiting scholar at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International at Menlo Park, California, in 1981, and as a visiting member of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University in 1988.

In 1992, Zadeh became a professor emeritus, the position he held till his death in 2017.

Achievements

• 

  Lotfi Asker Zadeh is responsible for the development of fuzzy logic and fuzzy set theory. Zadeh is also known for his research in system theory, information processing, artificial intelligence, expert systems, natural language understanding, and the theory of evidence. 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. His first two papers that set forth the fuzzy theories, “Fuzzy Sets” and “Outline of a New Approach to the Analysis of Complex Systems and Decision Processes,” have been listed as “Citation Classics” by the Citation Index, a publication that counts and lists those papers which have been cited most often in the writings of others.
  
  Zadeh's other works include Fuzzy logic and its application to approximate reasoning, Calculus of fuzzy restrictions, The concept of a linguistic variable and its application to approximate reasoning, From computing with numbers to computing with words — from manipulation of measurements to manipulation of perceptions, and Computing With Words. Principal Concepts and Ideas.
  
  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.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Linear System Theory

    (This book is the result of our teaching over the years an...)

    1963
  • Fuzzy Sets and Applications

    (Fuzzy set theory has become the foundation for the develo...)

    1987
  • Computing with Words: Principal Concepts and Ideas

    (In essence, Computing with Words (CWW) is a system of com...)

    2012
  • System Theory 1969

Views

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."

Quotations: "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."

Membership

Zadeh was a member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Association of Computing Machinery, World Congress on Cybernetics, American Mathematics Society, Society of Engineering Sciences, North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society, International Fuzzy Systems Association, Biomedical Fuzzy Systems Association of Japan and International Association of Knowledge Engineers. He was also a founding member of the Eurasian Academy.

Personality

Zadeh was an accomplished amateur photographer, specializing particularly in portraiture and has made portraits of many famous scientists and artists.

Interests

• Photography

Connections

Zadeh married Fay Sand, his childhood sweetheart from Iran, on March 21, 1946, and they had two children, Stella and Norman.

Father:

Rahim Aleskerzade

Mother:

Fanya Korenman

Wife:

Fay Zadeh

Daughter:

Stella Zadeh

Son:

Norman Zada