Norman Levitt

Norman Jay Levitt (August 27, 1943 – October 24, 2009) was a mathematician at Rutgers University. He was born in The Bronx and received a bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1963. He received a PhD from Princeton University in 1967.

Levitt was best known for his tireless criticism of "the academic Left"—the social constructivists, deconstructionists, and postmodernists—for their anti-science stance which "lump[s] science in with other cultural traditions as 'just another way of knowing' that is no better than any other tradition, and thereby reduce the scientific enterprise to little more than culturally-determined guess work at best and hegemonic power mongering at worst". His books (see Bibliography below) and review articles, such as Why Professors Believe Weird Things: Sex, Race, and the Trials of the New Left, expose the "academic silliness" and analyze the symptoms and roots of the academic Left's belief that "solemn incantation can overturn the order of the social universe, if only the jargon be appropriately obscure and exotic, and intoned with sufficient fervor". His book Higher Superstition is cited as having inspired the Sokal affair.

Bibliography

• 1989 Grassmannians and the Gauss Maps in Piecewise-Linear Topology
• 1994 Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (with Paul R. Gross)
• 1997 The Flight from Science and Reason
• 1999 Prometheus Bedeviled: Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture

External links

• Bibliography of Norman Levitt
• Obituary of Norman Levitt