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Alan Sokal
Sign in to saveAlso known as Alan David Sokal, Alan D.Sokal, Alan D Sokal, Alan D. Sokal
American physicist and mathematician
Key facts
- Born
- ( 1955-01-24 ) January 24, 1955 (age 71) , Boston , Massachusetts, U.S.
- Education
- Harvard University ( BA ) Princeton University ( PhD )
- Known for
- Sokal affair
- Father
- Nathan O. Sokal
- Fields
- Physics , mathematics , philosophy of science
- Institutions
- New York University National Autonomous University of Nicaragua University College London
- Thesis
- An Alternate Constructive Approach to the φ , 3 Quantum Field Theory, and a Possible Destructive Approach to φ , 4 (1981)
- Doctoral advisor
- Arthur Wightman
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Given name
- Alan
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- United States
- Place of birth
- Boston
- Occupation
- university teacher
- Educated at
- Harvard College
- Employer
- University College London
- Languages spoken
- English language
- Religion
- atheism
- Notable work
- Fashionable Nonsense
- Doctoral advisor
- Arthur Wightman
- Field of work
- physics
- Official website
- iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=ADSOK62
- Image
- Alan Sokal.jpg
- Significant event
- Sokal affair
Show 5 more facts
- date of birth
- 1955-01-24
- Erdős number
- 3
- Commons category
- Alan Sokal
- maintained by WikiProject
- WikiProject Mathematics
- interested in
- mathematics
via Wikidata · CC0
~6 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Alan David Sokal (/ˈsoʊkəl/ SOH-kəl; born January 24, 1955) is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works with statistical mechanics and combinatorics.
Sokal is a critic of postmodernism, and caused the Sokal affair in 1996 when his deliberately nonsensical paper was published by Duke University Press's Social Text. He also co-authored a paper criticizing the critical positivity ratio concept in positive psychology.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Alan Sokal” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.