Robert Reuven Sokal (January 13, 1926, in Vienna, Austria – April 9, 2012, in Stony Brook, New York)[1] was an Austrian–American biostatistician and entomologist.
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.
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.
Along with Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Sokal pioneered the comparative study of linguistic and genetic variation.