Noninferiority, adaptivity, fuzziness in pattern separation: remarks on the genesis of fuzzy sets

This paper is a contribution to the history of the theory of fuzzy sets. It results from the author's original research work in the last five years. Basing on studies of many scientific articles, newspapers, letters, etc., and interviews with protagonists and exponents of the theory of fuzzy sets in its first years, the author accrued facts of the history of this mathematical theory. The presented interpretation of this history is a reconstruction of the theory of fuzzy sets as an integral part of the development of system theory in the late 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. It delineates a specific path through the eventful history of this new field of research in the area of electrical engineering.