Academic Genealogy

[mdinitz]

simrob just posted a link to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which is an attempt to link students with advisors so that mathematicians can see their academic genealogy, which is a pretty neat idea. Rob was noticing that pretty much any of his possible advisors at CMU or Penn or Harvard link back to Alonzo Church, which is awesome. I decided to look

Comments

[ploamphed]

Not to burst your bubble or anything, but pretty much anyone educated in Western Europe and the US will have a geneology line traceable to Leibniz, and usually through Euler. And since Euler spent quite some time in Russia too, many Eastern bloc mathematicians come from that line of education too. Part of it has to do with a rather old practice of assigning two advisors to a student at certain universities

[mdinitz]

That's certainly true for mathematicians, espeically good mathematicians. But it doesn't necessarily hold for CS people, even very good ones. Especially since the database doesn't go back that far for non-math people, so lots of CS genealogies dead end pretty quickly. For example, here's the list for the other prof I was thinking of as an advisor, who's much more famous than my advisor:

Avrim Blum -> Ron Rivest -> Robert Floyd, who apparently never got a PhD despite being a CS prof at CMU and then Stanford.

And one of my JP advisors at Princeton:

Moses Charikar -> Rajeev Motwani -> Richard Karp -> Anthony Oettinger -> Howard Aiken -> Emory Chaffee, who was a physicist and whose advisor is unknown

And my dad:

Jeff Dinitz -> Richard Wilson -> Dwijendra Ray-Chaudhuri -> Raj Bose, who got a D.Litt. from Calcutta University in India in 1947, and whose advisor is unknown

So it's still cool that I go back to Leibniz through Euler :-).

[ploamphed]

Touche.

Now I wonder what is the qualification to be in the Genealogy Project. I was reading the AMS Notices the other day, and it seems that they fairly liberally grouped Computer Science as part of mathematics. Perhaps there are other esoteric fields normally not associated with math in the strictest sense of the word (yes, I understand that Theoretical CS has much to do with discrete math. Just that the common use of the word computer science tend to be equated with 'programming' in the public's eyes and that has rather less to do with math) being included.