The Fuzzy Revolution: Goodbye to the Aristotelian Weltanschauung

The medical arti®cial intelligence community congratulates you on your 80th birthday on 4 February 2001. On behalf of all patients and non-patients who are, or will in the future be, enjoying the medical fruits of your work, we would like to thank you for initiating and advancing The Fuzzy Revolution in science, technology, and society. Medicine has been among the privileged areas to early recognize this revolution and to embrace the fuzzy theory in parallel with the seminal Mamdani and Assilian application in the engineering sciences and technology [35,36] (see, e.g. [2,30,73,74]). The tempo, the scope, and the quantity of medical fuzzy research and technology have exponentially increased in the meantime. There is no medical subdomain left outside this accelerating fuzzy stream today. This advancement of medical thinking and practice we owe to your foresight already Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 21 (2001) 1±25