Memories of a crisp engineer

Abstract

I think that the first time I heard a talk on fuzzy sets was at one of the early International Symposiums on Multiple-valued Logic, (ISMVL), and the speaker was Prof. Lotfi A. Zadeh. Of course, I felt that the message was very interesting, but at that time, I was fully concentrated on multiple-valued switching theory, where by definition, everything was precise and crisp, i.e., as far from fuzziness as only possible. Things however were meant to change. A few years later, (in 1980) at the International Symposium on Multiple-valued Logic, in Evanston, Illinois, I met Prof. Enric Trillas, and that was the beginning of a deep, long lasting and "most dangerous" friendship: I started to be systematically exposed to the world of fuzzy, in a series of fuzzy related Seminars and Summer Schools organized by Prof. Trillas at different places in Spain, to which I was always invited. In one of the early Seminars he gave me as a present his recently published book on Fuzzy Sets [15]. I had no longer an excuse and I started to learn fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic. When in 1986 I became a Professor at the Department of Computer Science in the University of Dortmund, Germany, I introduced for the first time at the Department, seminars on fuzzy systems, which paved the way for my later Courses on "Intelligent Systems", (there is no accepted German equivalent for "Soft Computing"), as well as for several Master and Ph.D. Theses in the area. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.