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. ==Awards and honors==