A brief message on the twenty-fifth anniversary of NAFIPS

It seems fitting that the origins and history of NAFIPS are somewhat approximate. While annual meetings have been taking place since May of 1982, official documents show that the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society was incorporated in the state of California on 20 February 1985. Some of us like to trace the beginning of NAFIPS to discussions held at a conference sponsored by the nascent IFSA in Kauai in July of 1984 (the official first IFSA conference wouldn´t take place until the following year). This being the case, we can think of the year 2009 as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of NAFIPS. We leave it to an ambitious graduate student to determine exactly to what extent NAFIPS existed exactly twenty-five years before the present (summer of 2009); we, the current presidents of NAFIPS, are happy to mark and to celebrate the event without crisp reservations. NAFIPS has facilitated progress in two ways.