Lotfi Zadeh and Fuzzy Logic

Lotfi Zadeh, the computer scientist and electrical engineer whose theories of “fuzzy logic” rippled across academia and industry, influencing everything from linguistics, economics and medicine to air-conditioners, vacuum cleaners and rice cookers, died on Wednesday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 96.

Emerging from an academic paper Mr. Zadeh published in 1965 as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “fuzzy logic,” as he called it, was an ambitious effort to close the gap between mathematics and the intuitive way that humans talk, think and interact with the world.

If someone asks you to identify “a very tall man,” for instance, you can easily do so — even if you are not given a specific height. Similarly, you can balance a broom handle on your finger without calculating how far it can lean in one direction without toppling over.

Mr. Zadeh envisioned a mathematical framework that could mimic these human talents — that could deal with ambiguity and uncertainty in similar ways. Rather than creating strict boundaries for real world concepts, he made the boundaries “fuzzy.” Something was not in or out, for example. It sat somewhere on the continuum between in and out, and at any given moment a set of more complex rules defined inclusion.

Vladimir Vernadsky and Environmental Science

Vernadsky participated in the First General Congress of the zemstvos, held in Petersburg on the eve of the 1905 revolution to discuss how best to pressure the government to the needs of the Russian society; became a member of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (KD); and served in parliament, resigning to protest the Tsar's proroguing of the Duma.

He served as professor and later as vice rector of Moscow University, from which he also resigned in 1911 in protest over the government's reactionary policies. After the February revolution of 1917, he served on several commissions of agriculture and education of the provisional government, including as assistant minister of education.

Vernadsky first popularized the concept of the noosphere and deepened the idea of the biosphere to the meaning largely recognized by today's scientific community. The word 'biosphere' was invented by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, whom Vernadsky met in 1911.

In Vernadsky's theory of the Earth's development, the noosphere is the third stage in the earth's development, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition will fundamentally transform the biosphere.

In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are essential features of the Earth's evolution, and must have been implicit in the earth all along. This systemic and geological analysis of living systems complements Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection,which looks at each individual species, rather than at its relationship to a subsuming principle.

Vernadsky's visionary pronouncements were not widely accepted in the West. However, he was one of the first scientists to recognize that the oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere result from biological processes. During the 1920s he published works arguing that living organisms could reshape the planets as surely as any physical force. Vernadsky was an important pioneer of the scientific bases for the environmental sciences.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887-1943)

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887-1943)

Vavilov was born in Moscow, in 1887, and after graduating from The Commercial School of Moscow in 1906 he went on to study at the Moscow Institute of Agriculture. Influenced by the work of plant geneticist Gregor Mendel (hailed posthumously as ‘The father of modern genetics’)  Vavilov became interested in plant breeding. Specifically, he began conducting studies into disease resistance problems effecting oats, wheats and barley.

Seed collection and Leningrad

After the Civil War had ended, Russia experienced a terrible famine between 1921 and 1922. Devastated by drought, the country produced a wheat-harvest half of what it had been prior to the war. Lenin understood that something had to be done in order to improve Russian agriculture and to stave off another hunger crisis.


Vavilov, the then Head of the Department of Applied Botany, was elected by the new Soviet Union for a mission to travel to the United States to collect seeds of wild crops for cultivation. He intended these seeds to act as the basis for the creation of frost-hardy, drought-tolerant and disease-resistant varieties.

After returning from a successful trip to America, Vavilov continued his travels, venturing as far as the Middle East, Afghanistan, North Africa and Ethiopia, collecting valuable samples of bread-wheat and rye. By the end of 1924, his seed collection had grown to almost sixty thousand acquisitions, with a total of seven thousand coming from Afghanistan.

Photo of Vavilov collecting seeds in a market

The seeds collected by Vavilov were then deposited in the Leningrad Seedbank. Vavilov and his team envisioned Leningrad’s future to be that of a global seed bank, in which new strains of crops would be cultivated in an effort to end hunger worldwide.

'Centers of Origin of Cultivated Plants'




Photo of the title page of The Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants by Vavilov
While researching Vavilov I came across, The Origin and Geography of Cultivated Plants, a collection of reprints of selected works by Vavilov, which includes the ‘Centers of Origin of Cultivated Plants’. Published in 1926, it was the first piece of work to be awarded The Lenin Prize.

Photo of a map depicting Vavilov’s center of origins
Vavilov draws from his travels, marking specific points at which particular agricultural crops first came to be domesticated by humans. This enabled him to track a plant’s evolution through domestication and natural selction, and use this as the basis for his research into plant breeding, as he states:

In order to understand evolution and to guide our breeding work scientifically, even in application to our principal crops such as maize, wheat and cotton, we must go to the oldest agricultural countries, where the keys to the understanding of evolution are hidden.

Vavilov, N.I. 1932. The process of evolution in cultivated plants. Proc. 6th International Congress of Genetics. Ithaca, NY, Vol. 1:331-342, cited from Vavilov and his Institute: a history of the world collection of plant genetic resources in Russia, Igor G. Loskutov, p. 32

The tragic end for the humanitarian scientist

However, sadly Nikolai Vavilov’s story is one shrouded by tragedy. After plant genetics came into ill favour during the 1930s, Vavilov, his team and institution, were bitterly denounced by Stalin. Furthermore, after Stalin’s decision for the collectivisation of private farms led to a poor yield in crops and wide spread famine, Vavilov was used as a scapegoat. Unable to produce results quickly enough to resolve Russia’s agricultural problems, and falsely accused of working for the American government, Vavilov was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. Vavilov tragically died while being imprisoned from starvation.

Vavilov’s legacy

I have barely begun to scratch the surface on the numerous contributions that Vavilov made to the world of plant breeding and botany. However, I was particularly interested to learn that many of the strains of crops that we still use today in modern day agriculture are thanks to the work of Vavilov and his team.

I found researching Vavilov’s story truly fascinating and look forward to what is still to come during my year at Kew.

Emily Petch - Library Graduate Trainee

Glen Tomasetti – The Ballad of Bill White

The Circle and the Square

The Circle and the Square event by Suzanne Lacy ( Brierfield Mills Sepember 2017)

This event which took place from 15th to the 23rd September 2017 was a successful event to bring people of the community together. 

This new film is the result of artist Suzanne Lacy working with the people of Pendle exploring the cultural and spiritual backgrounds of our communities.