Norman Jay Levitt (August 27, 1943
– October 24, 2009)
was an American
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...
at
Rutgers University
Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...
.
Education
Levitt was born in
The Bronx
The Bronx ( ) is the northernmost of the five Boroughs of New York City, boroughs of New York City, coextensive with Bronx County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. It shares a land border with Westchester County, New York, West ...
and received a bachelor's degree from
Harvard College
Harvard College is the undergraduate education, undergraduate college of Harvard University, a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Part of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Scienc ...
in 1963.
He received a PhD from
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
in 1967.
Work
Levitt was best known for his criticism of "the academic Left"—the
social constructivists,
deconstruction
In philosophy, deconstruction is a loosely-defined set of approaches to understand the relationship between text and meaning. The concept of deconstruction was introduced by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who described it as a turn away from ...
ists, and
postmodernists—for their anti-science stance which "lump
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" (Levitt emphasized that his own view was left-wing, but such ideas dismayed him),
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 ''
Grassmannian
In mathematics, the Grassmannian \mathbf_k(V) (named in honour of Hermann Grassmann) is a differentiable manifold that parameterizes the set of all k-dimension (vector space), dimensional linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space V over a ...
s and the
Gauss Maps in Piecewise-Linear
Topology
Topology (from the Greek language, Greek words , and ) is the branch of mathematics concerned with the properties of a Mathematical object, geometric object that are preserved under Continuous function, continuous Deformation theory, deformat ...
''
* 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''
References
Further reading
*
External links
Bibliography of Norman Levitt
{{DEFAULTSORT:Levitt, Norman Jay
1943 births
2009 deaths
20th-century American mathematicians
20th-century American Jews
American critics of postmodernism
Harvard College alumni
Princeton University alumni
Rutgers University faculty
The Bronx High School of Science alumni
People from the Bronx
21st-century American mathematicians
Academics from New York (state)
21st-century American Jews