My PhD Genealogy

[kragen]

I spent some time in 02016 digging through different sorts of academic lineages. It turns out, for example, that you can also trace Leibniz back to Copernicus: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/academic-lineage.html

Thrun's page seems to have an error about Leibniz: "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1966, 1967, 1976"

It would be nice to be able to trace figures like al-Tusi back to Plato and Imhotep, to know if there really was an unbroken line of personal mentorship the way there is in the Buddhist lineages, or if at some point the oral line was severed. Perhaps during the Roman rampages through Greece, the line of transmission of philosophy only survived in Alexandria, or less plausibly, somewhere in India, only to resurface in Arabia while Europe was sunken into its Dark Ages. Or perhaps it had to be recovered from the few manuscripts the Christians hadn't yet recycled into hymnals, like the Archimedes Palimpsest.

We know that somewhere between Eudoxus and Galileo the idea of freely postulated axiom systems was lost, and it was not really fully rediscovered until the 19th century.

[telotortium]

I feel that the possibility of tracing academic lineage back to antiquity in the West is very dim, for the same reason that tracing descent from antiquity[0] in Europe has proven impossible - too few records survived. Even in the Catholic Church, the longest unbroken chain (i.e., for which records survive) of apostolic succession (i.e., which bishop consecrated each bishop) goes only back to the 1400s with Guillaume d'Estouteville, even though France in the 1400s was long after the Dark Ages and many records survive from the High Middle Ages onward.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_d%27Estouteville

[bgriirtuh]

Can you provide a reference for the claim that the concept of a freely postulated axiom system was implicit in Eudoxus? I'm very curious!

I assume the 19th century rediscovery you refer to was Boole, Hamilton et al and their work in logic and the beginnings of abstract algebra.

[languageserver]

no where on the site does it tell us that a lineage actually is. Does it mean that the mathematicians knew eachoter? that they adviced? cited?

[tim_hutton]

> "02016"

Thank you for preparing for the Y10K problem.

[seydor]

Academia is not that big, is quite incestuous, and such trees or descent are not rare. I think there was a website that listed people's academic family

here is one for neuroscience: https://neurotree.org/neurotree/

[Sniffnoy]

This is the site that does it for math: https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/

[xdavidliu]

what do you mean by "incestuous"? I'm having a hard time picturing the tree structure. Like if we keep things simple and assume every person on the tree "asexually spawns" multiple students, where does the "incest" come in?

Maybe one student having more than one advisor? If that's the case, usually it's just a thesis committee or reviewer or something, and not really multiple _main_ advisors

[lpolovets]

I started browsing https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/ after reading this post. Some of the genealogies are wildly impressive. For example:

https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=38586

Bernoulli -> Euler -> Lagrange -> Poisson and Fourier

[kragen]

The Euler -> Lagrange link is sort of dodgy, though. Lagrange was an autodidact. What he got from Euler was Euler's position at court, not a doctorate, though they did collaborate on some research before that.

[mandevil]

You can really see the results of the ebbs and flows of generations in this genealogy. The massive post-war three part economic, technological, and population booms just jumps out of this data. Ph.D's granted in this genalogy, per decade. 1870's: 1 1880's: 2 1890's: 0 1900's: 3 1910's: 0 (they were fighting a war, no time for dissertations) 1920's: 2 1930's: 2 1940's: 1 (They were fighting a war, no time for dissertations) 1950's: 0 (Baby bust from the great depression) 1960's: 4 (The intra-war and postwar kids, with funding and jobs) 1970's: 2 1980's: 0 (Too soon to be have their own students for a 1995 Ph.D)

[uptownfunk]

This makes me want to get a PhD to join the family.

[parsiad]

This looked like fun so I wrote a tiny script to generate these graphs for mathematicians using data from https://www.mathgenealogy.org/. Here is what it looks like for Gauss: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/parsiad/math-genealogy-gra.... If you want to make your own, I stuck the script here: https://github.com/parsiad/math-genealogy-graph.

[WiSaGaN]

There is a site for mathemitics where you can search with names: https://www.mathgenealogy.org/ pretty comprehensive according to my anecdotal evidence.

[josters]

I really like the simplicity of this.

I suppose this was done by hand. Having such an overview while doing the research would be really beneficial for discovering novel ideas and connections. I haven't come across such a tool as of yet.

[basementcat]

Much of this information is available from the Mathematics Geneology Project. https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=100193

[ray__]

There is academictree.org, which provides "academic genealogy" for quite a few disciplines–is this the type of tool you're looking for?

[motoboi]

I would love to have an ideas and people genealogy where you can select a thinker like Rousseau and have a graph of the main ideas in his works and their predecessors.

Think about his amour de soi. Did it existed previously anywhere else? Who talked about something similar earlier?

I'd die for something like that.

[pctrsq0perenl]

This reminded of a book that I read a while ago. It listed the important ideas that lead to modern computer science in a chronological manner[1]. Is there any work done to trace the genealogy of computer science like [2]?

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045308/ideas-that-created-th... [2] https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/

[Penyngton]

Depending on your definition of `Computer Science', [2] is already the link you're looking for. Church, Turing, von Neumann, McCarthy, Shannon and many other founding fathers of Computer Science are there. In fact, from your link, I believe the only people mentioned who are not in the Mathematics Genealogy Project are Lovelace and Boole, and that's because the PhD system didn't really exist in England at the time, so a specifically Computer Science based database wouldn't help with that.

[jgalentine007]

If you like this, you might be interested in AstroGen, the Astronomy Genealogy Project that I helped design: https://astrogen.aas.org

[tomr_stargazer]

thanks for the tip - just added myself!

[anm89]

Jean-Baptiste Fourier

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Joseph Lagrange

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Leonhard Euler 1726

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Johann Bernoulli 1694

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Gottfried Leibniz 1666

I was never aware of this connection. Is there some reasons or story behind how all of these geniuses clustered together?

[bgriirtuh]

It's hard to succeed in academia if you aren't in a lineage.

See Castelvecchi, D. "Majority of mathematicians hail from just 24 scientific ‘families’". Nature 537, 20–21 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.20491

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20491

[breck]

Here are some simple visualizations of this data: https://gist.github.com/breck7/b88155a58cbf83d32283b9ea50bf8...

[searine]

https://academictree.org/flytree/ does something similar for genetics or the base site for dozens of other disciplines.

[Fomite]

I will actually give this one a tremendous amount of credit for picking up both my real advisor, and my "shadow" advisor (a very, very close member who was on my committee, but at a different institution).

[thedailymail]

Leibniz - Bernoulli - Bernoulli - Euler - LaGrange was a pretty good run!

[dekhn]

He just needs to make a movie with Kevin Bacon and publish with Erdos to round things out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_numbe...

[Syzygies]

Ha! Erdős–Bacon numbers originated in a 2002 Telegraph article by Simon Singh, referenced by Wikipedia as [1]:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121112081753/http://www.telegr...

I came up with this game after realizing I had an Erdős–Bacon number. He credits me, but spun the article to make this sound like a "thing" other people cared about.

I was written out of that Wikipedia page long ago. Very little of what survives on that page stands up to close scrutiny.

Combining these numbers is an obscure amusement, but people take the separate numbers seriously. For Erdős numbers, should one count posthumous papers? My "2" via Persi Diaconis goes to "3" if one doesn't.

The original intent of the Bacon number game was to count actors in fictional speaking roles. My "2" here is from a speaking role in "A Beautiful Mind". The "Oracle of Bacon" replaced this intent with whatever their database could easily report. Appearing as oneself in a documentary on Erdős had the obvious hilarious effect.

One understand these links better by studying IMBD credits. Daniel Kleitman's "2" depends on a "Thanks" credit from "Good Will Hunting", and few of the other low Bacon numbers on the Erdős–Bacon Wikipedia page can be confirmed at all.

[melling]

Erdős has been reading Proofs from the Book for a couple decades, and is unable to publish.

Perhaps some of these people are available:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_by_Erdős_number

[_1]

Pretty cool. I had never thought to do this we my PhD genealogy before, it took about 10 clicks to get to Poisson (the first name I recognized).

[herodotus]

This is very cool, but I think it is a stretch to say that Rheticus was a student of Copernicus.

[chatterhead]

Do people use these genealogies to pick which schools to go to and people to learn from?

[etrautmann]

The field of Neuroscience tends to track lineages with Neurotree.org

[laurentoget]

we are cousins!