Wolfgang Smith

J. Wolfgang Smith
Born	1930 (age 86–87)

Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Realism, Platonism, Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, Neo-Scholasticism, Traditionalism
Main interests	Metaphysics, Physics, Mathematics, Philosophy of science
Notable ideas	Completely splitting the scientific method from the scientistic philosophy; showing how the former can be joined to a thomistic-based ontological realism; assigning to many hard sciences a place in such an ontological hierarchy.
Influences Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Adi Shankara, Meister Eckhart, Edmund Husserl, Alfred North Whitehead, René Guénon
Influenced Olavo de Carvalho

Wolfgang Smith (born 1930) is a mathematician, physicist, philosopher of science, metaphysician, Roman Catholic and member of the Traditionalist School. He has written extensively in the field of differential geometry, as a critic of scientism and as a proponent of a new interpretation of quantum mechanics that draws heavily from medieval ontology and realism.

Smith graduated in 1948 from Cornell University with a B.A. in Philosophy, Physics and Mathematics. Two years later he obtained his M.S. in Physics from Purdue University and, some time later, a Ph.D in Mathematics from Columbia University.

He worked as a physicist in Bell Aircraft corporation, researching aerodynamics and the problem of atmospheric reentry. He was a mathematics professor at MIT, UCLA and Oregon State University, doing research in the field of differential geometry and publishing in academic journals such as the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Journal of Mathematics, and others. He retired from academic life in 1992.