My Take
Alan Sokal is the guy who basically tricked an entire academic field into publishing gibberish — and pulled it off so cleanly that it sparked a genuine philosophical crisis about what "rigorous scholarship" even means. In 1996, he submitted a paper stuffed with deliberate nonsense to the journal Social Text, it sailed through peer review and got published, and the fallout — now called the Sokal Affair — rattled humanities departments for years. As a Harvard-educated physicist and mathematician at NYU, he had the credibility to land the prank, and his follow-up book Fashionable Nonsense laid out his case methodically. I find him genuinely fascinating because he wasn't just trolling — he was making a serious point about intellectual standards, and he made it in the most unforgettable way possible.
Overview
Alan David Sokal ( 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.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- Alan Sokal
- Name (Japanese)
- アラン・ソーカル
- Reading
- あらん・そーかる
- Born
- January 24, 1955 (age 71)
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Aquarius / Goat
- Origin
- Boston, Massachusetts, United States
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- mathematician / physicist / university teacher
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Private
- University
- Harvard University
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
5. Works & records
| Category | Title | Role | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Notable work | Fashionable Nonsense | — |
6. Links
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-02
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.