Alan Sokal
Mathematical physicist and critic of postmodernism
Alan Sokal is a mathematician and physicist who criticized postmodernism, notably through the 1996 Sokal affair hoax paper.
1 summary 15 min of listening
American Born 1955 in Boston, United States
About Alan Sokal
Alan Sokal was born in 1955 and is an American who teaches mathematics at University College London. He has also held a physics post at New York University. His research covers statistical mechanics and combinatorics. In 1996 he sent a deliberately meaningless paper to the journal Social Text, which published it, and he then revealed it to be a hoax. This became known as the Sokal affair. With Jean Bricmont he wrote Impostures Intellectuelles, which appeared in English a year later as Fashionable Nonsense. In 2008 he returned to the affair in Beyond the Hoax.