Fay zadeh biography

Lotfi Zadeh — professor emeritus, world-renowned computer scientist and leader of the college community — died on September 6, 2017 at the age of 96.

Lotfi A.

Zadeh was born in 1921 in Baku, Azerbaijan. He studied at Alborz College, an American Presbyterian Missionary School in Tehran, Iran, and later at the University of Tehran, from which he received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1942.

Zadeh traveled to the United States in 1944 to pursue graduate studies and received the S.M.

degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946. Subsequently, he joined the faculty of Columbia University as an instructor in electrical engineering, where he earned a Ph.D. degree in 1949.

He was appointed as assistant professor in 1950 and then promoted to full professor in 1957.

At Columbia University, Zadeh taught courses in electromagnetic theory, circuit analysis, system theory, information theory and sequential machines