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Gabriel Stolzenberg

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American mathematician (1937–2019)
Gabriel Stolzenberg
Born1937
Brooklyn, New York
Died19 November 2019
Watertown, Massachusetts
CitizenshipAmerican
Alma materColumbia University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forMathematics
Involvement in the science wars

Gabriel Stolzenberg (Brooklyn, 1937 - Watertown, Massachusetts, 2019) was an American mathematician who taught at various academic institutions.

Early years and education

Stolzenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York to Aba Stolzenberg (1905-1966), a Yiddish poet, and Bluma aka Florence Stolzenberg. His father, Aba, and other Yiddish artists would often gather around poet Zishe Landau. His elder sister, Ethel, participated in a social club created in 1938 by young Jewish girls in Crown Heights, called Faithful Friends Forever Club. She went on to receive a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Yale University, while, later, she and her husband, Irwin Tessman, were members of the biological sciences faculty at Purdue.

Stolzenberg attended Stuyvesant High School and then, at the age of sixteen, went to Israel where he joined a kibbutz for one year. Returning to the States, he entered Columbia University on a Ford Foundation scholarship to study Mathematics. He graduated in 1958 and went on to receive his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961.

Teaching

Stolzewnberg was Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard, and also taught at Brown and various northeastern institutions, such as Boston University, having also held visiting positions at Berkeley and in Paris. His research field included the theory of functions with several complex variables and Banach algebras. He published primarily in the Annals of Mathematics and the Acta Mathematica.

Philosopher of science

Stolzenberg, influenced by the work of Errett Bishop, was a constructivist in the philosophy of mathematics, as well as in science education.

He was an active participant in the so-called "science wars", defending post-modernism and constructivism against the positions held by scientists and philosophers, as well as against accusations of relativism. Solzenberg engaged publicly and for many years in a dialogue with opponents of the postmodernist approach to sciences and of the use of concepts of physics, mathematics, or chemistry in philosophy and the social sciences, attracting commentary across both positive and social sciences and drawing wider attention to these issues.

Selected works

Articles

Books

Private life

Stolzenberg married Judith Levine (b. 1938) soon after graduating from Columbia in 1958. He met his second wife, mathematician Nancy Kopell (b.1942), while they were both serving at the faculty of Boston University. Stolzenberg and Levine had two children, Nomi and Daniel Stolzenberg.

Nomi joined the USC Gould School of Law faculty in 1988, with her research focusing mainly on the relationship of law with religion, liberalism, psychoanalysis, and literature. Daniel went on to receive a PhD in History from Stanford and serve as a historian of knowledge in UC Davis, specializing in early modern Europe. In 2014, Daniel received the Howard R. Marraro Prize for the best book on Italian History published that year. He mainly researches the history of science and scholarship from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Gabriel Stolzenberg and novelist Cormac McCarthy were close friends.

Death

Stolzenberg died on 19 November 2019, at the age of 82, while being treated for a neurological disorder in Watertown, Massachusetts.

See also

Notes

  1. Stolzenberg has contributed to the talk page of the Science Wars article in Misplaced Pages.

References

  1. "Aba Stolzenberg". YIVO Archives. Retrieved 16 December 2023.
  2. ^ "Gabriel Stolzenberg". Legacy. Retrieved 16 December 2023.
  3. Landau Bass, Hyala. "Monograph: Zisha Landau z"l". Zchor.org. Ada Holtzman. Retrieved 16 December 2023.
  4. "Faithful Friends Forever Club minute book". New York Public Library. Retrieved 16 December 2023.
  5. ^ "Gabriel Stolzenberg". CurrentObituary. 19 November 2019. Retrieved 17 December 2023.
  6. ^ Halmos, Paul R. (1987). I Have a Photographic Memory. American Mathematical Society. p. 515. ISBN 978-0821819395. Retrieved 18 December 2023.
  7. Stolzenberg, Gabriel (June 1978). "Letter to the Editor" (PDF). Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 25 (4): 242. ISSN 0002-9920. Retrieved 16 December 2023. Why should it be presumed that if I, a constructivist, were to review such a book I would have little choice but to object?
  8. Stolzenberg, Gabriel (February 2004). "Replies to the Replies". Social Studies of Science. 34 (1). SAGE Publications: 115–132. doi:10.1177/0306312704041343. Retrieved 18 December 2023.
  9. Stolzenberg, Gabriel (February 2004). "Kinder, Gentler Science Wars". Social Studies of Science. 34 (1). SAGE Publications: 77–89. doi:10.1177/0306312704041336. Retrieved 18 December 2023. Review of Jay A. Labinger and Harry Collins (editors), The One Culture? A Conversation about Science, University of Chicago Press, 2001
  10. Stolzenberg, Gabriel (15 March 2004). "The Invention of Jacques Derrida, Physics Faker". Boston University. Retrieved 18 December 2023.
  11. Stolzenberg, Gabriel (2000). "Reading and Relativism: An introduction to the science wars". In Ashman, Keith; Barringer, Phillip (eds.). After the Science Wars: Science and the Study of Science (PDF). Routledge. ISBN 978-0415212090.
  12. Bricmont, Jean; Sokal, Alan (March 2004). "Reply to Gabriel Stolzenberg". Social Studies of Science. 34 (1): 107–113. doi:10.1177/0306312704040491. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  13. Stolzenberg, Gabriel (March 2004). "Replies to the Replies". Social Studies of Science. 34 (1): 115–132. doi:10.1177/0306312704041343. ISSN 0306-3127. Retrieved 19 December 2023.
  14. S. Wiedenhof, Jeroen; Lubotsky, Alexander; Schaeken, Jos (2009). Evidence and Counter-evidence - Essays in Honour of Frederik Kortlandt: General Linguistics. Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics. Brill Publishers. p. 416. ISBN 978-9042024717. Broad obstructive effects of language on progress in science have been intimated by Gabriel Solzenberg: despite a general awareness that language does seem to have the power to make us 'see things,' it is not taken seriously that language may be a determining influence and possibly a source of major error— for the contemporary scientist's own 'objective reality', the one into which he enters as a student and then shares with a community of fellow practitioners.
  15. S. Berger, Louis (2011). Language and the Ineffable: A Developmental Perspective and Its Applications. Lexington Books. p. 121. ISBN 978-0739147139. Solzenberg has shown the complex ways in which mathematicians' questionable dogmas are maintained by what he called 'belief traps'. However, these and the relatively few other similar attempts I know of to take the role of humans in mathematics into account remain circumscribed by their adultocentrism/Cartesian dualism.
  16. Judith Levine
  17. Wasserman, Elga Ruth (2000). The Door in the Dream: Conversations With Eminent Women in Science. Joseph Henry Press.
  18. "Nomi Stolzenberg". Gould.USC.Edu. USC Gould School of Law. Retrieved 18 December 2023.
  19. "Daniel Stolzenberg at Foundations of mathematics. Fwd: Gabriel Stolzenberg". CS.NYU.edu. New York University. Retrieved 18 December 2023.
  20. "Daniel Stolzenberg". UCDavis.Edu. University of California, Davis. Retrieved 18 December 2023.
  21. Pick, Grant (December 1995). "The MacArthur Manner". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 18 December 2023.

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