Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications 252, 495᎐517Ž. 2000 doi:10.1006rjmaa.2000.7185, available online at http:rrwww.idealibrary.com on Fuzzy Functions and Their Applications Mustafa Demirci Akdeniz Uni¨ersity, Department of Mathematics, 07058 Antalya, Turkey E-mail:
[email protected] View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE Submitted by Ulrich Hohle¨ provided by Elsevier - Publisher Connector Received February 7, 2000 1. INTRODUCTION The concept of fuzzy equalitywx 7 , which is also called the equality relationwx 10, 14 , the fuzzy equivalence relation wx 12 , the similarity relation wx6, 17, 21 , the indistinguishability operator wx 18, 19 , and the fuzzy functions based on fuzzy equalities, has a significant concern in various fieldsw 1, 2, 7, 8, 14x . The fuzzy functions and fuzzy equalities had been successfully applied in the category theoretical framewx 1, 6, 7, 9 and fuzzy control w 10, 13x . Vagueness on equality of points is mainly associated with Poincare’s´ paradox on physical continuumwx 7, 9, 11 , and it is shown as an example of Poincare’s paradox the ignorance of two very near numbers representing an attribute of a thing, for example, the temperature of weather, the cost of a car, the mass of a particle, etc., as the same number leads us some physical paradoxical situationswx 11 . The concept of fuzzy equality proves a useful mathematical tool to avoid Poincare-like´ paradoxeswx 7 . In this paper, adopting a slightly modified definition of the equality