Norman Levitt

Norman Jay Levitt (August 27, 1943 – October 24, 2009 ) was an American mathematician and writer. A specialist in topology and a professor at Rutgers University, he became better known to the general public for his criticism of postmodernist and social-constructivist descriptions of science.

Education and career Levitt was born in The Bronx and received a bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1963. , and his advisor was William Browder.

After two years at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Levitt joined the mathematics faculty at Rutgers University in 1969 and remained there until his retirement in 2007. His 1989 monograph Grassmannians and Gauss Maps in Piecewise-Linear Topology developed analogs of Grassmannians and Gauss maps, with applications to characteristic class theory, smoothing theory, and immersion problems.

From the 1990s, Levitt became prominent as a critic of postmodernist, social-constructivist, and deconstructionist approaches to science.

Levitt's criticism focused particularly on what he regarded as anti-scientific tendencies within parts of the academic left. In his obituary of Levitt, Michael Shermer summarized Levitt's objection as being directed at approaches that treated science as "just another way of knowing", thereby diminishing its epistemic status.