Google Doodle honors Lotfi Zadeh, father of fuzzy logic

Google on November 30 dedicated its Doodle to world-renowned Azerbaijani-American mathematician Lotfi Zadeh on the 57th anniversary of the "fuzzy logic" concept's creation.

Zadeh was born in Baku on Feb. 4, 1921, to a physician mother and journalist father. At the age of 10, his family moved to Iran, where he graduated with a science degree from the University of Tehran. He earned enough money selling goods to the US Army during World War II to move to continue his education in the US, earning a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946 and a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1949.

While serving as an electrical engineer professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Zadeh proposed using imprecise data to solve problems that may have more than one solution. His 1965 paper Fuzzy Sets - Information and Control sought to use mathematics to define human concepts such as "slightly," "tall" or "beautiful" and other concepts that have ambiguous meanings, thus creating a set theory where elements have a degree of membership.

Zadeh died in 2017 at the age of 96.