Carl died of a cerebral hemorrhage July 7, 2011, in New York City.

A gifted student from Dover, N.J., with encyclopedic academic interests, Carl majored in physics at Princeton and later earned a Ph.D. in high-energy physics at Cornell. His work on wide-angle bremsstrahlung (electromagnetic radiation) brought him some measure of recognition within the community of high-energy physics. That work led to his being lead author on the resulting paper and to an appointment at Harvard’s Cyclotron Laboratory.

Had he so desired, Carl could have parlayed his early success into a secure position within academia, but he chose a different path. His political views moved leftward in the early 1970s, and he joined both the Spartacist League and the International Communist League. Carl left us no written record of intellectual transformation, but his history was detailed in an obituary published online by the ICL Aug. 5, 2011. He archived the papers of Leon Trotsky and was an intermediary between the ICL and the rival Socialist Workers Party.

Surviving are his wife, Alice; a son, Lee; and a sister, Lois. We will miss his keen intelligence, his dry humor, and his quiet understatement.

Undergraduate Class of 1963