Robert R. Sokal

Robert Reuven Sokal (January 13, 1926, in Vienna, Austria – April 9, 2012, in Stony Brook, New York) was an Austrian–American biostatistician and entomologist. Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Stony Brook University, Sokal was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He promoted the use of statistics in biology and co-founded the field of numerical taxonomy, together with Peter H. A. Sneath.

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.