Millstein & Zadeh Are Honored
Ira M. Millstein ’47, ’49 Law, “the father of corporate
governance,” and senior partner in the international law firm of Weil,
Gotshal and Manges, LLP, and Professor Lotfi Zadeh ’49, the
“father of fuzzy logic” were honored by the Columbia Engineering School
Alumni Association for distinguished achievement in their respective
fields of law and computer science.
Mr. Millstein was the first recipient of the Samuel Johnson Medal,
given by the Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association (CESAA) in
recognition of accomplishment by alumni outside the realm of
engineering and applied science. In accepting the award, Mr. Millstein
acknowledged the benefit of his engineering education to his career in
the law. Addressing more than 300 alumni, students and friends of the
School gathered in Low Memorial Library Rotunda, Millstein said, “I
found that . . . the engineering training, the engineering process, was
indeed the foundation for my career as a lawyer. It engrained in me a
way, or method, of approaching a problem, any problem.”
Relating his inauspicious beginnings as an engineering student,
Millstein joked that his “major gift to the reputation of the Columbia
School of Engineering was not to become an engineer.” A graduate of the
newly created Bronx High School of Science, he confessed to being a
“total disaster” in the labs. “Finally,” he said, “someone, seeking to
preserve the school's equipment, if not its buildings, said ‘Try
Industrial Engineering’ . . . Low and behold I found my home with a
mentor, Walter Rautenstrauch, whose book I use until this day.”
“I treasure this simple proposition: ‘In the process of manufacture
there is also a flow of energy through the system. The energy is in the
form of money or its equivalent credit....’,” quoted Millstein.
“[Rautenstrauch] pointed out that the object of manufacturing is to
convert that energy efficiently into value. . . .Those forces on the
corporation, and the corporation's conversion of the energy of money
(or capital) into something of value, are the basis of what I deal with
today when I work with boards of directors and shareholders. A very
general proposition by Rautenstrauch - but elegant and descriptive.”
(Mr. Millstein’s complete remarks are available here).
A lawyer whose influence in shaping the rules, roles and regulations of corporate governance has made him widely sought as an advisor to corporate boards, Mr.Millstein has developed boardroom reforms designed to increase trust in publicly traded corporations and protect shareholders. He is Senior Associate Dean for Corporate Governance and the Eugene F. Williams Jr. Visiting Professor in Competitive Enterprise and Strategy at the Yale School of Management, which is home to the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance, named in his honor. He is a member of the board of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, Chairman of the New York State Commission on Public Authority Reform, and an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Professor Zadeh, who received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the School in 1949, began teaching at Columbia Engineering as an instructor in 1946, advancing to full professor in 1957. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Teheran in Iran in 1942, coming to the United States in 1944 to study at MIT, where he received his master’s degree in 1946. He spoke about how he came to Columbia.
Wanting to be near his parents who had arrived in New York from
Iran, he wrote to Columbia inquiring about a teaching job in the
Department of Electrical Engineering. “What would have happened if I
did not get that job?” he said, “I don’t know where I would be today.
Other institutions in New York had no research and did not have the
opportunities that were here at Columbia. Columbia University is a
unique institution and getting the job at Columbia was a turning point
in my career,” he said.
The second turning point, he said, was accepting a position as
professor of electrical engineering at the University of California at
Berkeley in 1959. At Berkeley, he became chair of electrical
engineering in 1963 and, when his department’s faculty members were
being recruited by the campus computer science center, Zadeh
incorporated that discipline into the department, creating the
Department of EECS, a trend that many universities worldwide have since
followed.
Zadeh early research began with seminal contributions to systems
analysis and information systems. But his first paper on fuzzy sets in
1965 secured his place in modern technology. Fuzzy sets challenged the
principles of Aristotelian logic and replaced them with a way to
calculate the imprecision of the real world. He further developed his
theory of fuzzy logic, which replaced the precision of mathematics with
the imprecise gradations of human thinking. No longer were things
considered either black or white, but shades of grey. Today, fuzzy
logic is widely accepted, with applications for everything from
consumer products, industrial systems and operations research to
medicine, geology and physics.
The recipient of 25 honorary degrees from universities world-wide, he
is a Fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, ACM, AAAI, IFSA, and the National
Academy of Engineering. He holds numerous international prizes, medals
and awards, single-authored over 200 major papers, and has served on 25
editorial boards throughout his career.
The Columbia Engineering School Alumni Association, representing the
School’s more than 20,000 graduates, established the Samuel Johnson
Medal in 2006. It is named in honor of Samuel Johnson, the first
president of Columbia (1754-1763), who championed the teaching of
nature and science as well as languages, reasoning, writing and
spelling. CESAA established The Egleston Medal in 1939. It is named for
Thomas Egleston, Jr., professor and the guiding force behind the
founding in 1864 of the Columbia School of Mines, the predecessor of
The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, and has
been given annually since its inception.
