Academic genealogy

penny November 23rd, 2007

[edited on 24 November 2007, factual errors found. Typos still exist but I'm too lazy to change them =P I know Riemman should be Reimann!!]

I stalked my academic roots in the Math Genealogy Project, remembering a remark my supervisor (Tanaka) made when we were in Christchurch that it is possible to trace supervisors from him up to Euler and Gauss. The conversation came up when I met a few people (like M Palmer) from the Feldman Lab in Stanford in the Evolution conference.

I browsed the site and searched for my MS adviser (del Rosario) from UPD, and found the same was true for him! They coalesce [most recent common ancestor] at David Hilbert.

(Click to enlarge)
This graph shows the two lineages (from Tanaka in my present degree and delRosario from UPD)

genealogy.gif

It’s so funny seeing these prominent mathematicians’ names appear in the line! Euler we hear about as early as grade school maths, then Poisson in our first statistics courses… College math introduced us to Lagrange, Fourier, Dirichlet, Borel, Kronecker, Eisenstein, Reimann, Bessel, etc.

It’s also kinda cool and surreal to be reading papers and books that were written by academic grandparents Marcus Feldman and Samuel Karlin.

Here’s a bigger picture of the ancestry. What I did here was extend the ancestry to as far back as possible. We see here that through the lineage of Gauss (1799) the farthest it took me is to Otto Mencke in 1665 and through the lineage of Euler (1726) the ancestral information goes all the way to Erhard Weigel in 1650.

In this network I forcefully included Markov, the mathematician to which Markov chains are named after. I also included a few names but did not go into depth with details on them (hence they might have descendants/ancestors that are not shown) and they are enclosed in rounded shapes.

(Click to enlarge)
tree
Graphs generated by Pen with GraphViz (dot) http://www.graphviz.org on Tanaka lab machine heraclitus
Source: http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/

2 Responses to “Academic genealogy”

  1. # Ajayon 24 Nov 2007 at 11:40 pm

    that’s waaay too cool!!!!!

    galing grabe!

    magugulat ako kung may vance at leithold pa dyan somewhere. hahaha

    i feel like congratulating you pen. you are one of a kind. :D

  2. # pennyon 25 Nov 2007 at 7:09 am

    nyeee it’s not so much myself as it is the great masters of science! pressure lang lalo dala nito eh hehe, alam ko namang wala ako sa kalingkinan nila, hehe. but it was fun making that picture =P

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