Lotfi A. Zadeh

Lotfi Rahim oglu Askerzadeh — known worldwide as Lotfi Zadeh — was born in Baku on 4 February 1921. He studied in Tehran and then in the United States at MIT and Columbia, and taught for decades at the University of California, Berkeley.

His 1965 paper "Fuzzy Sets" founded a new field — fuzzy logic — describing the world not only as "yes" or "no" but in degrees in between. The theory is now used in thousands of technologies, from washing machines and trains to cameras and artificial intelligence.

Zadeh died in Berkeley on 6 September 2017 and, at his wish, was buried in the Alley of Honour in Baku.