Early Days in Ghent

Abstract

Da arrived at Ghent University, as a PhD student on leave from Fudan University, in the autumn of 1987. He had been working mostly on numerical analysis at Fudan University, and his professors there had arranged for him to join our ’Seminar for Mathematical Analysis’. They may have been confused, as Da was often keen to mention, by this name for the department he was sent to, as they had told him he would be able to attend seminars on mathematical analysis there. Etienne Kerre, who was one of the people lecturing on that subject at the department, introduced Da to fuzzy set theory, which was then still a relatively young field, and also still relatively controversial. It was Etienne’s idea to let Da investigate the properties of inference schemes, such as Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens, when generalized using Zadeh’s approximate reasoning framework. Little or no advanced mathematical analysis was to come Da’s way for at least a number of years.