RUDOLF SEISING
Biography
Dr. Seising is an Adjoint Researcher at the European Centre for Soft Computing in Mieres (Asturias), Spain. His main areas of research comprise historical and philosophical foundations of science and technology.
After a study of Mathematics and Physics at the Ruhr-University of Bochum (Germany) he obtained his Ph.D. at the Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, and Statistics of the Ludwig–Maximilians–University in Munich (Germany), with a Thesis on Probabilistic Structures in Quantum Mechanics. At the same university he completed later the German Habilitation in history of science with the thesis: The Fuzzification of Systems: The Genesis of the Theory of Fuzzy Sets and their first Applications – Their Development until the 70s in the 20th century. (Springer 2007).
Among other books he edited Views on Fuzzy Sets and Systems from Different Perspectives. Philosophy and Logic, Criticisims and Applications. (Springer-Verlag 2009), and (together with Veroníca Sanz) Soft Computing in Humanities and Social Sciences (Springer 2012).
Dr. Seising has been Scientific Assistant for computer sciences at the University of the Armed Forces in Munich from 1988 to 1995 and for history of sciences at the same university from 1995 to 2002. From 2002 to 2008 he was with the Core unit for Medical Statistics and Informatics at the University of Vienna Medical School, which in 2004 became the Medical University of Vienna. Since 2005 he is College Lecturer at the Faculty of History and Arts, at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. From April to September 2008 he was acting as Professor for the history of science at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena (Germany) and from September 2009 to March 2010 at the Ludwig–Maximilians–University in Munich. He has been several times Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
Since 2004 he is Chairman of the IFSA Special Interest Group “History” and since 2007, of the EUSFLAT Working Group “Philosophical Foundations”.
Talk
The Birth and Blossoming of Fuzzy Systems − Towards a historical web-exhibition
Abstract: 50 years ago, in 1962, Professor Lotfi A. Zadeh used the word “fuzzy” for the first time in a scientific paper:
“..., we need a radically different kind of mathematics, the mathematics of fuzzy
or cloudy quantities which are not describable in terms of probability distributions.” (From Circuit Theory to System Theory, Proceedings of the IRE, May 1962, pp. 856-65.) It is also not to be forgotten that in about three years, the theory of Fuzzy Sets and Systems will be 50 years old. It is in our opinion that this 50 years long development of a now well-known theory that is used in technology, economics and other fields should have a mirror in a historical documentation in the world wide web. To this end we commenced the project of a web-exhibition on the history of Fuzzy Sets and Systems and its applications. The starting was founded by the European Centre for Soft Computing in Asturias, Spain and the 1st World Conference on Soft Computing (San Francisco, May 23-26, 2011). It is intended that the exhibition will be launched in the year 2013. We also aim to establish a real exhibition on history of Fuzzy Sets and Systems and its applications and we plan to open this exhibition during the IFSA-EUSFLAT 2015 conference that will take place in Oviedo, Asturias (Spain). This talk will give some information on the state of the art of these exhibition plans and examples of its content.