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Serge Lang, Mathematician and Crusader
November/December 2005
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
About five years ago, after this magazine published an article about a campus controversy involving math professor Serge Lang, he began to pay us frequent visits. He would stride briskly into our front office, smile at our editorial assistant, and hand her a thick envelope. “For the top banana,” he would say, and then just as briskly he would leave. Inside the envelope would be photocopies of documents supporting his case, and we soon had a voluminous file marked “Serge.”
It was nothing, though, compared to his own files. Lang, who died on September 12 in Berkeley, California, at the age of 78, was an unrelenting tilter at windmills for a series of causes, and he had great faith in the power of documentation to change people’s minds. Whether he had the support of other academics (as when he successfully fought what many saw as oppressive reporting requirements for federal grant recipients in the 1980s) or was largely on his own (as when he insisted that there was insufficient evidence that AIDS is caused by HIV ), Lang was ever hopeful that the truth as he saw it would win out.
Students knew Lang less as a crusader than as a passionate teacher and prodigious talker who liked to dine with undergraduates in Commons. He was also an eminent mathematician; he wrote a number of well-regarded textbooks, and for his important contributions to the field of algebraic geometry, he won the American Mathematical Society’s Cole Prize in 1959 and its Steele Prize for Math Exposition in 1999. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985.
Born in Paris, Lang moved with his family to California when he was in high school. He studied physics at Caltech and earned his PhD in mathematics at Princeton. He spent 15 years teaching at Columbia before coming to Yale as a tenured professor in 1972. He retired last year.
Remembered
Boris Bittker '41LLB, a Law School professor and leading authority on tax law, died on September 8 at the age of 88. Aside from a stint in government and military service after graduating, Bittker spent his entire career at the Law School, helping to shape the field of tax law while becoming what current dean Harold Koh called “the soul of this special institution. “ He was named a Sterling Professor of Law in 1970. Taxes weren’t Bittker’s only interest: in 1970 he helped with the founding of the Natural Resources Defense Council as an environmental legal defense group, and in 1973 he published a book that made an early case for slavery reparations.
Abraham Goldstein '49LLB, a former dean of the Law School, died from a heart attack at his Woodbridge, Connecticut, home on August 20. Goldstein, a Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law, had retired earlier this year. A native of New York, he graduated from City College there before coming to the Law School as a student. After working as a trial lawyer, he returned to Yale as a professor in 1956 and served as dean from 1970 to 1973. He was an influential scholar of criminal law, noted for his work on the insanity defense and criminal trial procedure.
Honored
Literary theorist Benjamin Harshav, the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature, has won the 2005 EMET Prize for Literature, administered by the prime minister of Israel. Harshav, who was cited by the prize committee for helping to “shape the study of literature in Israel, “ founded the comparative literature department at Tel Aviv University in 1966 and taught there until 1987, when he came to Yale.
Political scientist Ian Shapiro '83PhD, '87JD, has been named a Sterling Professor of Political Science. Shapiro, who directs the Center for International and Area Studies, is a scholar of democracy and distributive politics. He joined the Yale faculty in 1984 and has chaired the political science department and the program in ethics, politics, and economics. There are currently 29 Sterling Professors; the title is considered Yale’s highest faculty honor.  |
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