| Lotif Zadeh was born
in Baku, Soviet Azerbaijan in 1921. Zadehs father was a journalist and his mother
was a physician. This combination helped him to have a comfortable early child hood.
His family moved between countries and he studied the languages of every country he
lived in. He is quoted stating: "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."
This background of mixed nationality may have
attributed to helping Lotif see a different way to look at things, a "fuzzy" way
of thinking about things.
Lotif graduated from the University of Tehran
with a degree in electrical engineering in 1942. He then moved to the U.S. and
received his master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946.
He then studied at Columbia to earn his Ph.D. in 1949. Continuing in the
scholastic environment, Lotif took up teaching in 1959. He became the chairman of
the Electrical Engineering department at Berkeley University in 1963. While at
Berkeley he released his notion of "Fuzzy Logic's." Lotif's idea of Fuzzy
Logic was not, at first, accepted by his peers. He received much skepticism and
criticism, he was challenging the ways of the "Old, Proven" styles.
Fuzzy Logic provided a way to view things in a
way other than "black" and "white." Fuzzy logic is exactly what
Aristotle didn't do when he was looking at logic. Lotif said that we must have a way
to observe not only one's and zero's but also we need to know what to do with one point
three two one two. He said there wasn't just good and bad, but there was really
good, very good, somewhat bad, kind of bad, really really bad and everything else that may
fall between some kind of extreme terrible and glorious good. This span of pure
vagueness is exactly what Lotif wanted to provide.
The European world refused to accept fuzzy
logic, but the orient, not being tied to the rules of the great mathematicians and Western
Thinking, adopted fuzzy logic's and ran with it. The Japanese mastered the idea of
fuzzy logic and adapted it to many different types of control systems.
Lotif has continued to promote Fuzzy Logic.
In present times, Fuzzy logic can be found in every country, in almost every type
of control system. Fuzzy logic has become more than just the term implies, it has
grown to form things such as soft computing, nero computing, and genetic computing.
All of these forms of modern design are attempts to make computers be able to think
vaguely just like humans. |
