Edward Kofler

Edward Kofler (16 November 1911 – 22 April 2007) was a Polish-born Swiss mathematician who made important contributions to game theory and fuzzy logic by working out the theory of linear partial information.

Biography Kofler was born in Brzeżany, Austria-Hungary (now Berezhany, western Ukraine) and graduated as a disciple of among others Hugo Steinhaus and Stefan Banach from the University of Lwów Poland (now Ukraine) and the Jagiellonian University, having studied game theory. After graduation in 1939 Kofler returned to his family in Kolomyia (today Kolomea in Ukraine), where he taught mathematics in a Polish high school. After German attack on the town 1 July 1941 he succeeded to escape to Kazakhstan together with his wife. At Alma-Ata he managed a Polish school with orphanage in exile and worked there as mathematics teacher. After World War II ended he returned home with the orphanage. He was accompanied by his wife and their baby son. The family settled in Poland. From 1959 he accepted the position of lecturer at the University of Warsaw in the faculty of economics. In 1962 he gained a Ph.D. with his thesis Economic Decisions, Applying Game Theory. Then in 1962 he became assistant professor at the faculty of social science in the same university, specializing in econometrics.

In 1969 he migrated to Zurich, Switzerland, where he was employed at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich and scientific advisor at the Swiss National Science Foundation (Schweizerische Nationalfonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung). In Zurich in 1970 Kofler developed his linear partial information (LPI) theory allowing qualified decisions to be made on the basis of fuzzy logic: incomplete or fuzzy a priori information.

Kofler was visiting professor at the University of Saint Petersburg (former Leningrad, Russia), University of Heidelberg (Germany), McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) and University of Leeds (England). He collaborated with many well known specialists in information theory, such as Oskar R. Lange in Poland, Nicolai Vorobiev in the Soviet Union, Günter Menges in Germany, and Heidi Schelbert and Peter Zweifel in Zurich. He was the author of many books and articles. He died in Zurich.