George Klir

George Jiří Klir (April 22, 1932 – May 27, 2016) was a Czech-American computer scientist and professor of systems sciences at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York.

George Klir was born in 1932 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1957 he received a M.S. degree in electrical engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. In the early 1960s he taught at the Institute of Computer Research in Prague. In 1964 he received a doctorate in computer science from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences.

In the 1960s Klir went to Iraq to teach at the Baghdad University for two years. At the end he managed to immigrate to the U.S. He started teaching computer science at UCLA and at the Fairleigh Dickinson University. In 1969 he came to Binghamton University, where he later became professor of systems science. One year (1982–1983) he stayed as a fellow in Dutch Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS), where he completed the manuscript of his book Architecture of Systems Problem Solving. In 2007 he retired after 37 years at the university.

From 1974 to 2014 Klir was editor of the International Journal of General Systems, and from 1985 to 2016 of the International Book Series on Systems Science and Systems Engineering. From 1980 to 1984 George Klir was the first president of the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR). In the years 1981–1982 he was also president of Society for General Systems Research, now International Society for the Systems Sciences. He was further president of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society from 1988 to 1991 and the International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA) from 1993 to 1995.

Klir received numerous awards and honors, including 5 honorary doctoral degrees, the Gold Medal of Bernard Bolzano, Lotfi A. Zadeh Best Paper Award, the Kaufmann's Gold Medal, SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Research and IFSA Award for Outstanding Achievement. In 2007 he was awarded the Fuzzy Systems Pioneer Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS).

Klir was known for path-breaking research over almost four decades. His earlier work was in the areas of systems modeling and simulation, logic design, computer architecture, and discrete mathematics. Later research, from 1990s onward, included the areas of intelligent systems, generalized information theory, fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic, theory of generalized measures, and soft computing.