Lotfi A. Zadeh

One short paper. A new way for machines to think.

In 1965 a Berkeley professor — born in Baku to an Azerbaijani father and a Russian-Jewish mother, schooled in Tehran, trained at MIT and Columbia — published a thirteen-page paper called “Fuzzy Sets.” It proposed something heretical to classical logic: that an object need not simply belong or not belong to a set, but could belong partly, to a degree between 0 and 1. Ridiculed at first, the idea now runs inside subway brakes, cameras, washing machines, medical devices and the foundations of modern AI. It is among the most-cited scientific papers ever written.