Ladislav J. Kohout was born on January 22, 1941, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In 1963 he received his MSEE degree from the Czech Technical University in Prague where he studied electrical engineering.

By the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 Dr. Kohout was Deputy Head of Computing Department, Astronomical Institute, Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He also held several positions involving mostly interdisciplinary research in the Institute of Physiology and Institute of Physics, the Medical Faculty of the Charles University, Prague. He emigrated from Czechoslovakia soon after the invasion.

In 1974-79 he was an assistant professor in Medical Computing and Bio-Engineering at University College (Medical School), University of London. During this period he was also involved in teaching in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; he taught non-linear and stochastic control in a postgraduate course of Naval Engineering. In 1974-79 he held the title of a Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Electronics and Systems Engineering, University of Essex.

Dr. Kohout joined Brunel, the University of West London in 1979. He was a tenured associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, and also a founding member of Brunel Human-Computer Studies Group and its Chairman in 1979-82. For his research accomplishments he was promoted to Reader in Computer Science.

Dr. Kohout immigrated to the US with priority residence visa as an internationally recognized scientist in April 1988.

Professor Kohout was a member of several professional societies: a Chartered Engineer registered with the British Council of Engineering Institutions, a Fellow and a member of the Board of Directors of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, a Fellow of the Cybernetics Society and a Member of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Until his death on November 20, 2009, Dr. Kohout was a Professor of Computer Science at the Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Professor Kohout was internationally recognized as one of the major contributors in fuzzy sets, in particular in theory and applications of crisp and fuzzy relations. He introduced the Possibility theory as a formalism sufficient for description of arbitrary automaton.

Ladislav Kohout was the US Editor of Journal of Intelligent Systems, an Associate Editor of the journal Information Sciences a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of General Systems and of the American Journal of Applied Science. He was a Fellow of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics. He was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Intelligent Machinery.
During 1995–2003, he served as the Director of the FSU Institute of Cognitive Sciences. Professor Kohout was a member of a number of professional societies, a Chartered Engineer registered with the British Council of Engineering Institutions, a Fellow and a member of the Board of Directors of the International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, a Fellow of the Cybernetics Society and a Member of the New York Academy of Sciences. BK-relational products he co-invented with Wyllis Bandler play a major role in development of relational computational methods in the field of intelligent systems and elsewhere.
His publications include over 250 scientific papers.

The name of this theory first introduced by L.J. Kohout and B.R. Gaines in 1975 comes from the terms related to Subjunctive possibility dealt with in Modal logic.

• Brian R. Gaines and Ladislav J. Kohout, "Possible Automata", in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic, pp. 183-192, Bloomington, Indiana, May 13-16, 1975.

• Ladislav J. Kohout on Mathematics Genealogy Project,
• Ladislav J. Kohout page on Florida State University web-site,
• Brian R. Gaines and Ladislav J. Kohout, "Possible Automata" (link to archive.org), in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic, pp. 183-192, Bloomington, Indiana, May 13-16, 1975.
• Ladislav J. Kohout Obituary on Taylor and Francis online.