Krasimir T. Atanasov Books

This book aims to be a comprehensive and accurate survey of state-of-art research on intuitionistic fuzzy sets theory and could be considered a continuation and extension of the author´s previous book on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets, published by Springer in 1999 (Atanassov, Krassimir T., Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets, Studies in Fuzziness and soft computing, ISBN 978-3-7908-1228-2, 1999). Since the aforementioned book has appeared, the research activity of the author within the area of intuitionistic fuzzy sets has been expanding into many directions. The results of the author´s most recent work covering the past 12 years as well as the newest general ideas and open problems in this field have been therefore collected in this new book.

In the beginning of 1983, I came across A. Kaufmann's book „Introduction to the theory of fuzzy sets“ (Academic Press, New York, 1975). This was my first acquaintance with the fuzzy set theory. Then I tried to introduce a new component (which determines the degree of non-membership) in the definition of these sets and to study the properties of the new objects so defined. I defined ordinary operations as „n“, „U“, „+“ and „.“ over the new sets, but I had began to look more seriously at them since April 1983, when I defined operators analogous to the modal operators of „necessity“ and „possibility“. The late George Gargov (7 April 1947 - 9 November 1996) is the „god father“ of the sets I introduced - in fact, he has invented the name „intu itionistic fuzzy“, motivated by the fact that the law of the excluded middle does not hold for them. Presently, intuitionistic fuzzy sets are an object of intensive research by scholars and scientists from over ten countries. This book is the first attempt for a more comprehensive and complete report on the intuitionistic fuzzy set theory and its more relevant applications in a variety of diverse fields. In this sense, it has also a referential character.