Logic for living …

… Remembering Lotfi Zadeh, the Inventor of Fuzzy Logic | The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Zadeh, who died earlier this month, at the age of ninety-six, had modest hopes for his paper; he figured that the main reason it had been accepted was because the author was a member of Information and Control’s editorial board. Gradually, though, his innovation found a following, particularly in the East. In the nineteen-eighties, engineers in Sendai, Japan, incorporated fuzzy logic into the design of the city’s new subway, using it to program the system’s famously smooth starts and stops. A catalogue of fuzzy consumer electronics followed—cameras, washers and dryers, vehicle transmissions and anti-skid braking systems, air-conditioners and thermostats, rice cookers, vacuum cleaners, and unmanned helicopters.