Robert R. Sokal

Robert Sokal was born in 1926 in a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. In 1939, following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, he escaped with his family to China. He earned his bachelor's degree at St. John's College in Shanghai, where he married, and from there moved with his wife Julie to the University of Chicago, where he also worked as a librarian to complement his scholarship. He took his Ph.D. degree under the supervision of the well-known termite systematist Alfred E. Emerson. He was also strongly influenced by Sewall Wright, who served on his dissertation committee. Sokal developed an interest for statistics and quantitative biology.

In 1959, Sokal moved to the University of Kansas where he developed—initially in collaboration with Charles Duncan Michener—quantitative techniques for classifying organisms and building dendrograms, which later came to be called numerical taxonomy methods. At the State University of New York, Stony Brook, in collaboration with F. James Rohlf, Sokal worked on new statistical methods for the analysis of geographic variation. His interests shifted to anthropology and population genetics, and he directed studies on the population history of Europe as inferred from genetic and ethnohistorical data. Along with Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Sokal pioneered the comparative study of linguistic and genetic variation.

• Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1983
• Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1986
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1975, 1983
• Member, United States National Academy of Sciences, 1987
• Doctor of Science (honorary), University of Crete, Iraklion, 1990
• Distinguished Statistical Ecologist Award, International Association for Ecology, 1994
• Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award, American Association of Physical Anthropologists, 2004

• Caminalcules
• Gabriel graph

• Stefan Schomann: Letzte Zuflucht Schanghai. Die Liebesgeschichte von Robert Reuven Sokal und Julie Chenchu Yang. München: Heyne 2008. ISBN 978-3-453-15260-1. (Paperback: Der große gelbe Fisch. ISBN 978-3-453-64525-7)
• David L. Hull: Science as a Process. An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988. ISBN 978-0-226-36051-5

• Oral history interview with Robert Sokal, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive
• National Academy Member Profile
• Michael A. Bell. "ROBERT REUVEN SOKAL: 1926–2012" (PDF). Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University. Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 July 2012. Retrieved 25 May 2023.
• Guido Barbujani, Walking with Robert Sokal, Human Biology, 84(5):481-8 (October 2012)
• Douglas J. Futuyma, Robert R. Sokal (1926–2012), Science, 336:816 (18 May 2012)
• Michael Bell, Robert Reuven Sokal, 1926-2012, Evolutionary Anthropology, 21:87–88 (2012), on Wiley Online Library
• University obituaries: Robert R. Sokal, The University of Chicago Magazine, Jul-Aug 2012