Fuzzy logic was pioneered by Dr. Lotfi Zadeh, whom I met when he gave a lecture at the University of Toronto.

I don’t have a very strong impression of McNeill and Freiberger’s book. I had read it a long time ago, and it’s just what you would expect. Nothing from it in particular stuck to my memory, except that while fuzzy logic caught on in Japan, it had completely failed to capture the public’s imagination in North America.

Kosko’s book was more memorable. I found it charming, but elementary, repetitive, and overly mystical. A reader is not likely to learn very much from it on the technical aspects of fuzzy logic, but will get a glimpse into the mind and personality of one of its proponents and practitioners.

– davinci 11788

Related posts:

1. Two popular books on the human genome
2. A life in books

The following photo shows two of these:

The first, Matt Ridley’s Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, has one chapter for each pair of chromosomes in the human genome. Ridley is a very engaging popular science writer, and I recommend the book highly. (I also enjoyed his book on how human sexuality has shaped our evolution, The Red Queen.)

The second book is The Double Helix, James D. Watson’s account of the discovery of the double helical structure of DNA. The book, and its author, are both very controversial, and the account given in the book is generally considered to be unfairly biased in favour of Watson. Nevertheless, it was an interesting read for being a first-hand account of a major scientific discovery.

– davinci 11772

Related posts:

1. Two popular books on fuzzy logic
2. The causes of my depression, part 3: “stop wasting money on worthless books”
3. A life in books