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.
