New Haven Independent

It had been years since I had heard that voice. Yet I knew instantly to whom it belonged. It belonged to Serge Lang, a famous Yale mathematician. You don’t forget that voice.
I was confused, though.
“Hi, Serge,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Tom Tomorrow. I just picked up the Advocate. There’s no Tom Tomorrow!”
Then it hit me. It was Wednesday morning. The New Haven Advocate, the paper where I was an editor at the time, had just hit the street. “This Modern World,” the mildly subversive political comic strip drawn by Tom Tomorrow (aka New Haven’s Dan Perkins) usually appeared on page 5 of the paper. But this week it had been moved four pages deeper into the paper.
“Do you have the paper?” I asked Serge. “Turn to page 9.”
Silence, as Serge turned to page 9.
“Okay,” he said. Click.
That was Serge Lange—all business. And his business was crusading for independent critical thought, crusading against efforts by those in power to squelch independent critical thought.
On this Wednesday morning he worried that a hidden power had silenced Tom Tomorrow’s weekly plea for Americans to burrow through the fog of lies perpetuated by our political culture. Reassured that that threat was gone, Serge had no time for small talk. He rarely did. It was on to the next front of the battle.
He battled the establishment to his death last week at the age of 78. And he always seemed in a hurry, too busy for small talk, or even, it seemed, to pay attention to his wardrobe or whether it was time for a meal.
Serge made his professional reputation in math, authoring a flood of articles and textbooks about algebra, geometry, and number theory. His Wikipedia entry reports, in part, “His textbooks, which have a pure mathematics orientation, are famous for the originality of their problems. According to one legend in circulation within the Princeton University math community during the 70s, Professor Lang wrote at least one of his textbooks over a single weekend on a bet. He was a member of the Bourbaki group.” And Lang was known for his public fights with other mathematicians over the years.
Those of us outside academia, especially in journalism, heard from Serge about his other battles. For years he took on a leading social scientist, Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, over his influential, and in Serge’s opinion spurious, mathematical methods. He compiled thousands of pages of correspondence and academic documents in an ever-expanding file. He Xeroxed them and dumped them on the desks of reporters and students and politicians and anyone else he thought he could convince to spend hours examining.
Not long before his death he visited me with an armload of documents relating to his latest crusade, his conviction that HIV does not cause AIDS.
I confess: I never got around to reading them. I told Serge I’d try. I told him that often over the decades I knew him, and I didn’t always keep up my end of the bargain. While I didn’t always share his passion for his causes, I always admired, to my soul, Serge’s dedication. “Stop thinking like a bullshit journalist!” he would snap at me whenever I repeated political cant (or asked him a question he didn’t like). It makes sense, I guess, that a product of pre-war Europe would consider it essential to spend every breathing moment cajoling people to resist submitting their brains to thought control. That above all was Serge Lang’s life mission. And a worthy one it was.

(Click here to read his Yale Daily News obituary.)