The birth of grey system theory is an outcome of Professor Julong Deng who has been working with perseverance for decades.

Prof. Deng was born in Lianyuan County, Hunan Province of China in 1933. He got his degree in electrical machinery from Huazhong Institute of Technology and then joined the same institute in 1955 as a teaching assistant. Prof. Deng used to keep an eye on new ideas related to his field which led to his later investigation into multi-variable system control problems. In the 1960s, he put forward a new method -- “control by removing redundant”. His paper entitled “multivariable linear system shunt calibration device of a comprehensive approach” was published in 1965. By the early 1970s, the method of “control by remove redundant” has been widely recognized as a representative methodology in cybernetics.

In 1965, Prof. L. A. Zadeh proposed Fuzzy Sets (Zadeh, 1965). Prof. Deng was involved in research of fuzzy mathematics. He published some papers in fuzzy mathematics. And served as a member of editorial board for several journals on fuzzy mathematics. In the late 1970s, Prof. Deng devoted himself to the study of "prediction and control problems of economic system”. In dealing with systems where "some information is known, and some information is unknown", the main challenge is to develop an effective method to represent such systems. Despite the difficulties, Professor Deng and his colleagues have made significant progress in their explorations. In 1982, his pioneering paper titled “The Control Problems of Grey Systems” published by Systems and Control Letters (Deng, 1982). The publication of this seminal article indicated that grey system theory, a new branch of research, came into being.

Since the birth of Grey System Theory, it has received significant attention from academic communities and industries both in China and overseas, especially in real world applications.

So far, Prof. Deng's works has been cited over 50 thousand times. Prof. Deng won the award of founder of Grey System Theory at the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Grey Systems and Intelligent Services which held in Nanjing. In 2011, he was elected as the honor fellow of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics at the joint conference of the 15th WOSC International Congress on Cybernetics and Systems and 2011 IEEE International Conference on Grey Systems and Intelligent Services.