We are sad to report that Distinguished Professor
Emeritus Robert R. Sokal passed away in Stony
Brook on Monday, April 9, 2012 at the age of 86.
Prof. Sokal was a founding member of the
Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony
Brook University, co-founder of the revolutionary
field of Numerical Taxonomy, and the principal
investigator for major research programs in the
spatial variation of insects and humans and the
evolutionary response to selection in insects. He
supervised the training of numerous Ph.D.
students and taught biometry to a much larger
number. He was a member of the National Academy
of Sciences of the USA and received many other
honors during his remarkable career. We in the
Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony
Brook will miss his insights, support, mentoring and friendship.
Prof. Sokal was born into a middle class Jewish
family on January 13, 1926 in Vienna, Austria,
the only child of Klara and Siegfried Sokal. He
fled the looming Nazi menace with his family in
1939 to Shanghai, China, which became the refuge
for tens of thousands of European Jews during
World War II. Robert attended secondary school
and college in Shanghai, earning his B.S. degree
in Biology from St. Johns University in 1947.
There he also met a young Chinese student, Julie
Chenchu Yang, who became his wife and lifelong
love. A book entitled Letzte Zuflucht Schanghai
(Final Refuge Shanghai) by Stefan Schomann
(2008), in German and translated into Chinese,
chronicled Roberts flight from Vienna, his
familys refuge in Shanghai, and the start of his
life with Julie, before he came to the United
States for his graduate education.
Prof. Sokal received his graduate training at the
University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D.
in Zoology in 1952 under the direction of the
renowned entomologist and ecologist Alfred E.
Emerson and was strongly influenced by Sewall
Wright. He joined the Entomology Department at
the University of Kansas in 1951 as an
instructor, and rose rapidly through the academic
ranks to Professor of Statistical Biology in
1961. He was recruited by Lawrence B. Slobodkin
to the fledgling Department of Ecology and
Evolution at the State University of New York at
Stony Brook in 1968, where he spent the remainder
of his career. He held many visiting
professorships during these years, including at
Hebrew University, Institute of Advanced Studies
in Portugal, University of Vienna, and the Collège de France in Paris.
Prof. Sokals scientific publications span seven
decades and a broad range of subjects. He
published major papers in ecology, evolution,
anthropology, geography, statistics, and of
course systematics. His papers appeared in
Science, Nature, PNAS USA, and many of the best
specialty journals in ecology, evolution,
systematics, anthropology, and statistics. He is
probably best known to evolutionary biologists
and ecologists for his Biometry textbook with F.
James Rohlf, the fourth edition of which he
completed less than a year before his death. A
recent search of Google Scholar indicated that
the third edition of Biometry had been cited
19,851 times. Prof. Sokal is also well known as
the co-founder of Numerical Taxonomy with Peter
H. A. Sneath in 1963. This work promoted
statistical methods for classification and was
controversial both because it advocated
abandonment of traditional evolutionary
systematics and led to the debate between the
advocates of phenetic and cladistic methods.
Regardless, it is undeniable that Prof. Sokal
pioneered the use of rigorous, objective
statistical methods and the employment of
computers in systematics. Prof. Sokal started his
career with dissertation research on patterns of
geographical variation in Pemphigus aphids.
Later, he initiated research on the evolutionary
response to selection in laboratory populations
of Tribolium beetles and house flies. His last
major empirical project, which he pursued for
more than two decades, focused on analysis of
patterns of spatial variation in human
populations for a variety of traits and the
development of new methods for these analyses.
Prof. Sokal published 12 books (5 translated) and
206 articles, and his publications have been cited tens of thousands of times.
Prof. Sokal came to Stony Brook University as a
Professor in 1968. He was named Leading Professor
in 1972 and Distinguished Professor in 1991. He
retired in 1995 and became a very active
Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He served as
the Chair and Graduate Program Director of the
Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony
Brook University from 1980 to 1983 and as Vice
Provost for Research and Graduate Studies from
1981 to 82. He remained very active in scientific
research, the Department of Ecology and
Evolution, university affairs, and the National
Academy of Sciences, even attending departmental
colloquia until the last year of his life, when
his declining health precluded it.
Prof. Sokal also served in many other prestigious
capacities, including President of the Society
for the Study of Evolution, the American Society
of Naturalists, the Classification Society, and
the International Federation of Classification
Societies, the last of which he helped found. He
was an associate editor of Evolution (1965-68)
and editor of The American Naturalist
(1969-1974). He received many high honors,
including both Fulbright and Guggenheim awards,
the Charles R. Darwin Award for Lifetime
Achievement of the American Association of
Physical Anthropologists, and many others. He
was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences and The American Association for the
Advancement of Science, and a member of the
National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
Robert R. Sokal is survived by his wife of 64
years, Julie Sokal, his children David Sokal and
Hannah Sokal-Holmes, and four grandchildren. He
will be greatly missed by his family, friends, and colleagues.
Written largely by Mike Bell in my department.
Jessica Gurevitch
Professor and Chair
Department of Ecology and Evolution
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, NY 11794-5245
631-632-8590
<http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/gurevitchlab/>http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/gurevitchlab/
