SUMMARY
In 1965 Lotfi A. Zadeh published "Fuzzy Sets", his pioneering and controversial paper, that now reaches almost 100,000 citations. All Zadeh’s papers were cited over 185,000 times. Starting from the ideas presented in that paper, Zadeh founded later the Fuzzy Logic theory, that proved to have useful applications, from consumer to industrial intelligent products. We are presenting general aspects of Zadeh’s contributions to the development of Soft Computing(SC) and Artificial Intelligence(AI), and also his important and early influence in the world and in Romania. Several early contributions in fuzzy sets theory were published by Romanian scientists, such as: Grigore C. Moisil (1968), Constantin V. Negoita & Dan A. Ralescu (1974), Dan Butnariu (1978). In this review we refer the papers published in "From Natural Language to Soft Computing: New Paradigms in Artificial Intelligence" (2008, Eds.: L.A. Zadeh, D. Tufis, F.G. Filip, I. Dzitac), and also from the two special issues (SI) of the International Journal of Computers Communications & Control (IJCCC, founded in 2006 by I. Dzitac, F.G. Filip & M.J. Manolescu; L.A. Zadeh joined in 2008 to editorial board). In these two SI, dedicated to the 90th birthday of Lotfi A. Zadeh (2011), and to the 50th anniversary of "Fuzzy Sets" (2015), were published some papers authored by scientists from Algeria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Hungary, Greece, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, Pakistan, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Spain, Taiwan, UK and USA.