Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh (/ˈzɑːdeɪ/; Azerbaijani: Lütfi Rəhim oğlu Ələsgərzadə; Persian: لطفی علیعسکرزاده; February 4, 1921 – September 6, 2017) was a mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, and professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Zadeh was best known for proposing fuzzy mathematics, consisting of these 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.According to Google Scholar, as of February 2021, Zadeh's work has been cited about 270,000 times in scholarly works, with the 1965 Fuzzy sets paper receiving more than 115,000 citations. 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).
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."[29] 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." He described himself as "an American, mathematically oriented, electrical engineer of Iranian descent, born in Russia."
Zadeh was married to Fay Zadeh and had two children, Stella Zadeh and Norman Zada. Zadeh's wife, Fay Zadeh, wrote about her travels and their experiences together in visiting "exotic places" and meeting interesting people around the world in her book -- My Life and Travels with the Father of Fuzzy Logic. Zadeh died in his home in Berkeley, California,[3] on September 6, 2017, at the age of 96. He is buried in the first Alley of Honor in Baku, Azerbaijan, the city in which he was born. His funeral was well attended by "highly respected people", including the President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev. 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.
