Deng Julong (; January 1933 – June 22, 2013) was a professor of

Huazhong University of Science and Technology The Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST; ) is a public research university located in Guanshan Subdistrict, Hongshan District, Wuhan, Hubei province, China. As a national key university directly affiliated to the Ministry of E ...

Wuhan Wuhan (, ; ; ) is the capital of Hubei, Hubei Province in the China, People's Republic of China. It is the largest city in Hubei and the most populous city in Central China, with a population of over eleven million, the List of cities in China ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. He is acknowledged as the founder of

grey system theory Grey relational analysis (GRA) was developed by Deng Julong of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. It is one of the most widely used models of grey system theory. GRA uses a specific concept of information. It defines situations with no i ...

, first proposed in 1982 with the publication of his paper “Control problems of grey systems,” in the international journal ''Systems and Control Letter'', edited at the time by

Roger W. Brockett Roger Ware Brockett (born October 22, 1938 in Seville, Ohio) is an American control theorist and the An Wang Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Harvard University, who founded thHarvard Robotics Laboratoryin 1983. Brocket ...

, a professor at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. This theory underlies the theory of

grey relational analysis Grey relational analysis (GRA) was developed by Deng Julong of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. It is one of the most widely used models of grey system theory. GRA uses a specific concept of information. It defines situations with no ...

. His theory inspired many noted scholars like

Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest Yi Lin (; born 1959), also known as Jeffrey Forrest and Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest, is a professor of mathematics, systems science, economics, and finance at Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education ( Slippery Rock campus) (SSHE) and at several ma ...

Liu Sifeng Liu Sifeng (; born 15 July 1955) is a Chinese systems engineer. He is the director of the Institute for Grey Systems Studies at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China. He is best known for his work on grey system ...

, and Keith W. Hipel, recipient of

Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize The Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize was established according to the will of Dorothy J. Killam to honour the memory of her husband Izaak Walton Killam. Five Killam Prizes, each having a value of $100,000, are annually awarded by the Canada Cou ...

.Liu, SF., Yang, Y., and Forrest, J. (2017). ''Grey Data Analysis''. Springer.

Academic career

The works of Professor

Lotfi A. Zadeh Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh (; az, Lütfi Rəhim oğlu Ələsgərzadə; fa, لطفی علی‌عسکرزاده; 4 February 1921 – 6 September 2017) was a mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, an ...

significantly inspired Deng, and the uncertainty of the

Deng Xiaoping Deng Xiaoping (22 August 1904 – 19 February 1997) was a Chinese revolutionary leader, military commander and statesman who served as the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from December 1978 to November 1989. After CC ...

era inspired him to work on uncertain systems. In 1965, he proposed the theory of multivariate system control. His academic paper, "an integrated approach to the parallel calibration of multivariate linear systems", was published in ''Acta Automatica'' (Volume 3, Issue 1), a journal by Chinese Association of Automation and the Institute of Automation,

Chinese Academy of Sciences The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS); ), known by Academia Sinica in English until the 1980s, is the national academy of the People's Republic of China for natural sciences. It has historical origins in the Academia Sinica during the Republ ...

, which was later summarized by the

Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union The Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union was the highest scientific institution of the Soviet Union from 1925 to 1991, uniting the country's leading scientists, subordinated directly to the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (until 1946 ...

at the time. He had been to

Aerospace Valley Aerospace Valley is a French Business cluster, cluster of aerospace engineering companies and research centres. The cluster is located in the regions of Occitania (administrative region), Occitanie and Nouvelle-Aquitaine in the southwest of Fra ...

(France), University of Maryland (USA),

National Central University National Central University (NCU, ; Pha̍k-fa-sṳ: ''Kwet-li̍p Chung-yong Thài-ho̍k'', Wade–Giles: ''Kuo2 Li4 Chung Yang Ta4 Hsüeh2'' or ''中大'', ''Chung-ta'') is a public research university with long-standing traditions based in Taiwa ...

(Taiwan) and

Tatung University Tatung University (TTU/) is a private university in Zhongshan, Taipei, Taiwan. It was first founded in 1956 as Tatung Institute of Technology but renamed in 1999 as Tatung University. Currently, Tatung University has four colleges: College ...

(Taiwan) for delivering lectures on grey system theory. His works have been cited by more than 30,000 times, according to

CNKI CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure; ) is a private-owned publishing company in China since 2014. CNKI maintains high annual subscription fees due to its ''de facto'' monopoly status on journal search in China. Because its subscription ...

database. His highly cited paper, his first paper on grey systems, received more than 3500 citations till February 2019, according to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

. He was the founding editor-in-chief of ''The Journal of Grey System'', an SCIE journal indexed by

Clarivate Clarivate Plc is a British-American Public company, publicly traded analytics company that operates a collection of subscription business model, subscription-based services, in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics; business intelligence, ...

, and served it for 24 years. In Deng’s "academic career of 60 years, there existed neither holidays, weekends nor a line between service and retirement," says one of his former students.

Recognition

He was honored at the 2011 congress of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics by the award of an Honorary Fellowship. On September 7, 2019, German Chancellor

Angela Merkel Angela Dorothea Merkel (; ; born 17 July 1954) is a German former politician and scientist who served as Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. A member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she previously served as Leader of the Oppo ...

visited Wuhan and delivered a speech at the

. In her speech, Merkel highlighted the influence of grey system theory and its pioneers. In her speech, she said that the works of Professor Deng, the founder of grey system theory, and Professor

, “have made a profound impact on the world.”

Death

He was born in

Lianyuan Lianyuan () is a county-level city and the 7th most populous county-level division in Hunan Province, China; it is under the administration of Loudi prefecture-level City. Located on the geographical centre of Hunan, the city is bordered to the ...

Hunan Hunan (, ; ) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the South Central China region. Located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze watershed, it borders the province-level divisions of Hubei to the north, Jiangxi to ...

. He died at the age of 80 in China.

References

External links

WOSC Congresses
{{DEFAULTSORT:Deng, Julong 1933 births 2013 deaths Mathematicians from Hunan Huazhong University of Science and Technology faculty Educators from Hunan People from Loudi