Lotfi Zadeh

Lotfi Zadeh was born in Baku in 1921. His father was assigned as a journalist from Iran (Southern Azerbaijan). His mother was Russian, she was a physician. The first three grades of elementary school he went in Baku (from age 7 to 10). He was only child in the family.  In   childhood   when he was 10 he had gone through most of the classics-Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Chekhov, Turgenev as well as world classics like Shakespeare. His family left for Tehran in 1931. He continued his education in english and graduated from the University of Tehran in 1942. He took Ph.D. from Columbia University in New York   1949. There he went on to teach Systems Theory.

In 1959, he began a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley ( UCB).  Lotfi Zadeh became famous for inventing the concept of “Fuzzy Logic”. He presented it in 1965. Nowadays Lotfi zadeh is famous all over the world. “Fuzzy Logic” is being used in the fields of biomedicine, finances, geography, philosophy, ecology, agricultural processes, water treatment, satellite remote sensing, handwriting analysis, nuclear science, weather forecasting and stock market analysis. In January 1999 Lotfi Zadeh published the theory of “Fuzzy Logic” on the computational theory of perceptions. As Lotfi Zadeh says in his interview to “Azerbaijan International” magazine in 1999: “This theory will have a significant impact, not just in engineering, but in basic sciences and many, many   other fields. This concept opens the door to a major enlargement of the role of natural languages in scientific theory. People use formulas, mathematics and numbers when doing scientific work, but this particular development will make it possible to use natural language in scientific discourse. And it marks a significant paradigm shift”. In spite of being old he usually remembers his youth and compares the lifestyle and ideas of modern youth with his times. He says: “ Today there are so many negative influences on young people. For example, there are no role models to speak of, so young people indulge in things like drinking, sex and drugs. You see a lot of that sort of stuff going on. The books that I read as a child all had heroes-men of ideals and integrity. They were always fighting evil. We didn’t have the “anti-hero” that one finds in literature and drama today-characters that are against everything and, in themselves, rotten to the core”. Lotfi Zadeh never says that he is Azerbaijanian, he says that he belongs to the mankind. He represents Azerbaijan with his scientific activity. The life of a man who belongs to the mankind is very simple. He is far from luxurious life. He lives as simple as ordinary people. I would like to finish my article about Lotfi Zadeh with the words of his follower, an outstanding physician Rafig Aliyev: “ Genius is the such summit that nobody is raised to there, the man rises by himself”. Lotfi Zadeh is one of them.