Yorgos Kourtakis · CC BY-SA 4.0

Alan Sokal is a physicist and mathematician who set off one of the decade's sharpest academic controversies in 1996, submitting a deliberately nonsensical paper on the postmodern interpretation of physics that Duke University Press's Social Text published without noticing it was a hoax. The 'Sokal affair' became a lasting case study in how humanities journals evaluate scientific claims. He has otherwise built a career in statistical mechanics and combinatorics, and later co-authored a paper challenging the statistical basis of the 'critical positivity ratio' in positive psychology.