Lotfi A. Zadeh: On the man and his work

Abstract Zadeh is one of the most impressive thinkers of the current time. An engineer by formation, although the range of his scientific interests is very broad, this paper only refers to his work towards reaching computation, mimicking ordinary reasoning, expressed in natural language, namely, with the introduction of fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic, and soft computing, as well as more recently, computing with words and perceptions.