Lotfi Zadeh was a Professor in the Graduate School of the Computer Science Division of Berkeley EECS. He also e served as the Director of BISC (Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing). Lotfi Zadeh passed away on September 6, 2017.

Zadeh was an alumnus of the University of Tehran, MIT and Columbia University. From 1950 to 1959, he was a member of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University. He joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at UC Berkeley in 1959 and served as its Chair from 1963 to 1968. During his tenure as Chair, he played a key role in changing the name of the Department from EE to EECS. He held visiting appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ; MIT, Cambridge, MA; IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, CA; AI Center, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA; and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University.

Zadeh was a Fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, ACM, AAAI, and IFSA. He was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Sciences, Korean Academy of Science & Technology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the International Academy of Systems Studies, Moscow, and the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences. He was a recipient of the IEEE Education Medal, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, the IEEE Medal of Honor, the ASME Rufus Oldenburger Medal, the B. Bolzano Medal of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Kampe de Feriet Medal, the AACC Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, the Grigore Moisil Prize, the Honda Prize, the Okawa Prize, the AIM Information Science Award, the IEEE-SMC J. P. Wohl Career Achievement Award, the SOFT Scientific Contribution Memorial Award of the Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory, the IEEE Millennium Medal, the ACM 2001 Allen Newell Award, the Norbert Wiener Award of the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society, Civitate Honoris Causa by Budapest Tech (BT) Polytechnical Institution, Budapest, Hungary, the V. Kaufmann Prize, International Association for Fuzzy-Set Management and Economy (SIGEF), the Nicolaus Copernicus Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the J. Keith Brimacombe IPMM Award, the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame, the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum Wall of Fame, the Egleston Medal, the Franklin Institute Medal, the Medal of the Foundation by the Trust of the Foundation for the Advancement of Soft Computing, the High State Award ‘Friendship Order’, from the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Transdisciplinary Award and Medal of the Society for Design and Process Sciences, other awards and twenty-four honorary doctorates. He published extensively (over 200 single-authored papers) on a wide variety of subjects relating to the conception, design and analysis of information/intelligent systems, and served on the editorial boards of over seventy journals.

Prior to the publication of his first paper on fuzzy sets in 1965, Zadeh’s work was concerned in the main with systems analysis, decision analysis and information systems. His current research is focused on fuzzy logic, semantics of natural languages, computational theory of perceptions, computing with words, extended fuzzy logic and Z-numbers.