Famous Azerbaijani scientist Lotfi Zadeh died aged 96, the Azerbaijani Consulate in Los Angeles posted on Facebook.
The Consulate expressed deeply sadness over his death.
Lotfi Zadeh was born in 1921 in Baku to an Iranian Azerbaijani father from Ardabil, Rahim Aleskerzade, who was a journalist on assignment from South Azerbaijan and a Russian Jewish mother, also an Iranian citizen, Fanya Korenman, who was a pediatrician from Odessa.
In 1931, when Lotfi Zadeh was ten years old, his family moved to Tehran in Iran, his father's homeland. There he continued his education in English in a private Presbyterian school in Tehran. After high school, he sat for the national university exams and placed second in the entire country. In 1942, he was graduated from the University of Tehran in electrical engineering.
During World War II, he moved to the US and took a Master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1946 and a Ph.D. from Columbia (New York) in 1949, where he began teaching systems theory.
Since 1959, Lotfi Zadeh has taught at Berkeley, first in the Electrical Engineering (EE) Department where he became Chair in 1963, and later in the Computer Science Division (EECS).
It's a vivid example of how in real life Lotfi Zadeh shuns abrupt absolute categories that don't take into account life's complexities. It's the same kind of thinking that characterizes Fuzzy Logic, an unorthodox theory which he invented which is impacting computer technology.
Lotfi Zadeh was also credited, along with John R. Ragazzini, in 1952, with having pioneered the development of the z-transform method in discrete time signal processing and analysis. These methods are now standard in digital signal processing, digital control, and other discrete-time systems used in industry and research. He was an editor of International Journal of Computational Cognition.