Alan Sokal

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.

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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

Occupation

mathematician / physicist / university teacher

University

Harvard University

Filmography / notable works

• Official sitehttps://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=ADSOK62
• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan%20Sokal
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%A2%E3%83%A9%E3%83%B3%E3%83%BB%E3%82%BD%E3%83%BC%E3%82%AB%E3%83%AB
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q370022

Tags

• Massachusetts
• mathematician
• physicist
• university teacher

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.