1921–2017
He was born Lotfi Aliasgerzadeh. His life was built around four cities: Baku, Tehran, New York and Berkeley.
Lotfi Zadeh was born in Baku on 4 February 1921. His father, Rahim Aleskerzade, was an Iranian Azerbaijani journalist from Ardabil, posted to Baku for work. His mother, Fanya (Feyga) Korenman, was a Jewish pediatrician from Odesa who held Iranian citizenship.
In Baku he attended elementary school for three years, from age seven to ten — years he later recalled as having “a significant and long-lasting influence” on his thinking and outlook on life.
In 1931, as Stalin's collectivisation drive began, the family moved to Tehran. There Lotfi spent eight years at Alborz High School, a Presbyterian missionary school, where he also met his future wife, Fay (Faina).
He placed third in Iran's national university entrance exams and ranked first in his class for his first two years. He graduated from the University of Tehran in 1942 with a degree in electrical engineering — one of only three graduates in that field that year, due to disruptions from the Second World War.
He moved to the United States in mid-1944 and entered MIT as a graduate student that September, earning an MS in electrical engineering in 1946.
From 1947 he worked at Columbia University as an engineer, was offered a doctoral instructorship, and earned his PhD in 1949. He became assistant professor in 1950 and full professor in 1957 — teaching at Columbia for ten years in total.
It was in this period, in 1952, that he and John R. Ragazzini developed the Z-transform — now a standard tool in discrete-time signal analysis.
In 1959 he joined the electrical engineering faculty at UC Berkeley. He chaired the department from 1963 to 1968, and it was under him that it became the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) in 1968.
At Berkeley he supervised more than 50 doctoral students, directed the Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing (BISC), and continued working as professor emeritus until his death in 2017.
He met Fay (Faina) Zadeh at Alborz High School in Tehran; they later married and had two children, including son Norman Zada. In 1998 Fay Zadeh published a memoir, My Life and Travels with the Father of Fuzzy Logic.
Lotfi Zadeh died on 6 September 2017 at the age of 96, at his home in Berkeley. Shortly before his death he had asked the Azerbaijani government to bury him in Baku according to Muslim custom.
His body was brought to Baku and buried at the Alley of Honor on 29 September. President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan attended the ceremony.
