Fuzzy Logic: History, Methodology and Applications to Education

Fuzzy Logic has been evolved today to a valuable extension and necessary supplement of the traditional bi-valued Logic of Aristotle, with applications covering almost all the specter of human activities. This new logic of infinite values, developed rapidly during the last 50 years, is based on the notion of fuzzy set introduced by Zadeh in 1965. The target of the present review article is twofold: First to give to the non expert a general idea about the content and the perspectives of Fuzzy Logic. Second to present applications of it to Education (student assessment), which constitute part of the author's research work during the last twenty years on building fuzzy models representing several real life situations. Thus, the article includes a brief account of the history and development of Fuzzy Logic, the ways of dealing with the uncertainty in a fuzzy environment, the use of the Centre of Gravity (COG) defuzzification technique as an assessment method, as well as the triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs) and their arithmetic. Note that the COG technique is the most popular defuzzification method used in fuzzy mathematics, whereas the TFNs is the simplest form of fuzzy numbers, which play in general an important role in fuzzy mathematics, analogous to the role of the ordinary numbers for the traditional mathematics.