Abe Mamdani, in Memoriam

Professor Ebrahim (Abe) Mamdani died on January 22, 2010. He was born in Tanzania in June 1942 and educated in India, he went to UK in 1966. After obtaining his PhD at Queen Mary College, University of London, he joined its Electrical Engineering Department, where he developed the first fuzzy controller. In the mid-eighties he moved to Imperial College, where he was now an Emeritus Professor. In recognition of his contributions he received the ‘European Fuzzy Pioneer Award’ from the European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology (EUSFLAT) in 1999, and the ‘Fuzzy Systems Pioneer Award’ from Computational Intelligence Society of the IEEE in 2003. He was also a Fellow of IEEE, IFSA, and of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the IEE in the UK. With his disappearance, the world’s fuzzy community did lose one of its most distinguished members, the one to whom all of us are mainly indebted for introducing the first ideas on fuzzy control as an engineering discipline. EUSFLAT loses one of its ‘Pioneers’, the Imperial College loses a Professor whose contributions to the research and to the prestige of his department are widely appreciated, and the European Centre for Soft Computing loses one of its supporters in the Scientific Committee, who was always deeply involved in the Centre’s development. The unexpected passing away of Abe meant a big loss for all his friends and colleagues, not to mention his relatives. Professor Mamdani’s wife, Ginny, deserves our deepest sympathy for his loss.