Obituaries

Famed anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has died prematurely at the age of 100:

A powerful thinker, he was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France, said last November in an interview with The New York Times on the centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so revered that at least 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday.

An imposing legacy is “Mythologiques,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, published from 1964 to 1971. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man” — challenge the reader with their almost obsessive interweaving of theme and detail. They are nothing less than an interpretation of the world, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions.

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Qian Xuesen, considered the "father" of China's space program, which surprises me it even exists, also died at a premature age. He was 98.

He was as important in this country as he was in China.
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