Gabriel Stolzenberg

Gabriel Stolzenberg (Brooklyn, 1937 - Watertown, Massachusetts, 2019) was an American mathematician who taught at various academic institutions.

Early years and education
Stolzenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York to Aba Stolzenberg (1905-1966), a Yiddish poet, and Bluma aka Florence Stolzenberg. His father, Aba, and other Yiddish artists would often gather around poet Zishe Landau. His elder sister, Ethel, participated in a social club created in 1938 by young Jewish girls in Crown Heights, called Faithful Friends Forever Club. She went on to receive a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Yale University, while, later, she and her husband, Irwin Tessman, were members of the biological sciences faculty at Purdue.

Stolzenberg attended Stuyvesant High School and then, at the age of sixteen, went to Israel where he joined a kibbutz for one year. Returning to the States, he entered Columbia University on a Ford Foundation scholarship to study Mathematics. He graduated in 1958 and went on to receive his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961.

Teaching
Stolzewnberg was Benjamin Peirce Instructor at Harvard, and also taught at Brown and various northeastern institutions, such as Boston University, having also held visiting positions at Berkeley and in Paris. His research field included the theory of functions with several complex variables and Banach algebras. He published primarily in the Annals of Mathematics and the Acta Mathematica.

Philosopher of science
Stolzenberg, influenced by the work of Errett Bishop, was a constructivist in the philosophy of mathematics, as well as in science education.

He was an active participant in the so-called "science wars",  defending post-modernism and constructivism against the positions held by scientists and philosophers, as well as against accusations of relativism. Solzenberg engaged publicly and for many years in a dialogue with opponents of the postmodernist approach to sciences and of the use of concepts of physics, mathematics, or chemistry in philosophy and the social sciences,  attracting commentary across both positive and social sciences and drawing wider attention to these issues.

Private life
Stolzenberg married Judith Levine (b. 1938) soon after graduating from Columbia in 1958. He met his second wife, mathematician Nancy Kopell (b.1942), while they were both serving at the faculty of Boston University. Stolzenberg and Levine had two children, Nomi and Daniel Stolzenberg.

Nomi joined the USC Gould School of Law faculty in 1988, with her research focusing mainly on the relationship of law with religion, liberalism, psychoanalysis, and literature. Daniel went on to receive a PhD in History from Stanford and serve as a historian of knowledge in UC Davis, specializing in early modern Europe. In 2014, Daniel received the Howard R. Marraro Prize for the best book on Italian History published that year. He mainly researches the history of science and scholarship from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Gabriel Stolzenberg and novelist Cormac McCarthy were close friends.

Death
Stolzenberg died on 19 November 2019, at the age of 82, while being treated for a neurological disorder in Watertown, Massachusetts.