IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine - February 2018 - 14

Little I Knew That I Had Come to a Major Fork in the Road of Life
One bright fall day in 1966, at the library of the Department of
Mathematics of the University of Buenos Aires, I first met Lotfi
through his work. I happened to be casually browsing the latest
available issue of Information and Control. An article entitled
"Fuzzy Sets" caught my eye. Little I knew at the time that I had
come to a major fork in the road of life. I was then a young
would-be scientist seeking to solve a data representation problem arising from economic modeling. The significant possibilities offered by fuzzy sets through the application of continuous
variable mathematics to set-partition problems led me to formulate new approaches to the fledgling field of cluster analysis.
About a year later, now working in the group of Richard Bellman at the University of Southern California, I was having lunch
with one of my early mentors, Robert Kalaba, when we were
approached by a jovial and effusive man whom Kalaba readily
introduced: "This is Lotfi Zadeh." It was then that I met Lotfi in
person. Having corresponded before with him, Lotfi recognized
my name and we agreed to discuss, that afternoon, topics of
common interest. That was the beginning of a professional relationship lasting fifty years.
It is impossible to summarize the content of our conversations during that long period of time but their nature was a significant and unique aspect. There were never any scarcity of
viewpoints, topics, considerations, open or closed problems,
and relevant research that Lotfi did not seem to have noticed or
reflected upon. From the onset it was clear that-within the typical meandering nature of social chitchat and the apparently

From Left to right: Hamid Berenji, Elie Sanchez, Piero Bonissone,
Enrique Ruspini, Lotfi Zadeh, and Reza Langari, Second IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems, San Francisco, CA, 1993.

deceiving demeanor of his genial mood-he always meant to
discuss serious business.
When I moved from Southern California to Palo Alto he never
failed to make late night calls in the middle of our busy travel
schedules to chat from topics ranging from approximate reasoning to generalized implication to multiobjective optimization
to robotics. His unique mixture of kindness and inquisitiveness
was still present when I visited him this past February. I am
most fortunate to have been a disciple, colleague, and friend of
Lotfi and so are all who, through the years, benefit from the
fruits of his work.
By Enrique H. Ruspini, Palo Alto, CA, USA

First in Scholarship, First in Kindness and First in the Heart of His Colleagues
Zadeh was considered to be among the top system theorists of his
day, and then, almost over night, he disappeared from that field,
wandering (as some might say) in the fuzzy wilderness. At least
Moses had a following when he wandered through the wilderness.
Zadeh had no one, and one of the great "miracles" is that he not
only survived, but, by the time he left the fuzzy wilderness, he had
also created a strong tribe of what one might now call fuzzyites.
When I look over my entire career, I can see Zadeh's influence
on it to degree greater than around 0.7. Just as some people have
an Erdös number2, I propose that some people could have a
Zadeh influence number (ZIN), but, of course, unlike the former,
which is a crisp integer, a ZIN would be fuzzy (e.g., around 0.7).
In early 2007, Zadeh had a mild heart attack. In May of that
year I was being honored at USC to commemorate my 70th by
a one-day Symposium. Lotfi had agreed to be a speaker at the
Symposium before the heart attack, and to my amazement he

Lotfi Zadeh at USC with Jerry Mendel and three of his former
students (from left to right): John Kormylo, Fred Aminzadeh
and Mostafa Shiva.

showed up-but that was Lotfi-"First in scholarship, first in
kindness, and first in the heart of his colleagues."
By Jerry Mendel, University of Southern California, USA

2
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdo˝s_number; accessed June 26, 2010), "The Erdo˝s number describes the 'collaborative distance' between a person and
mathematician Paul Erdo˝s as measured by [joint] authorship of mathematical papers. He was an influential and itinerant mathematician, who spent a large portion of his later life
living out of a suitcase and writing papers with those of his colleagues willing to give him room and board. It [the Erdo˝s number] was created by friends as a humorous tribute to
the enormous output of Erdo˝s, one of the most prolific modern writers of mathematical papers (he published more papers during his life (at least 1400) than any other mathematician in history), and has become well known in scientific circles as a tongue-in-cheek measurement of mathematical prominence."

Ieee ComputatIonal IntellIgenCe magazIne | February 2018

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdo˝s_number

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine - February 2018