[HN Gopher] My PhD Genealogy
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       My PhD Genealogy
        
       Author : hkc
       Score  : 61 points
       Date   : 2022-10-19 20:08 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (robots.stanford.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (robots.stanford.edu)
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | 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/
        
       | kragen wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | bgriirtuh wrote:
         | 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 wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | ghufran_syed wrote:
           | usually it means that the "parent" was a phd supervisor for
           | the "child" researcher who studied for a PhD under that
           | supervisor
        
         | telotortium wrote:
         | 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
        
         | tim_hutton wrote:
         | > "02016"
         | 
         | Thank you for preparing for the Y10K problem.
        
       | thedailymail wrote:
       | Leibniz - Bernoulli - Bernoulli - Euler - LaGrange was a pretty
       | good run!
        
       | lpolovets wrote:
       | 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
        
       | dekhn wrote:
       | 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...
        
         | melling wrote:
         | Erdos 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_Erdos_number
        
       | uptownfunk wrote:
       | This makes me want to get a PhD to join the family.
        
       | breck wrote:
       | Here are some simple visualizations of this data:
       | https://gist.github.com/breck7/b88155a58cbf83d32283b9ea50bf8...
        
       | josters wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | motoboi wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | johndbeatty wrote:
           | I wanted something like this as well, and I have a prototype
           | of something much simpler (using node2vec to generate
           | embeddings using data from Wikidata and DBpedia (and
           | Twitter)). It doesn't really do what you want, but you might
           | find it interesting.
           | 
           | Rousseau:
           | https://pov.is/e/93f9822c-1ed8-4bc9-aec9-064e7bb6807c Amour
           | de soi: https://pov.is/e/82e9f674-ebbf-4c36-b225-ec1653ce3367
           | 
           | You can go backwards and forwards in time using by-year view
           | (though missing data in Wikidata makes this a bit difficult):
           | https://pov.is/e/93f9822c-1ed8-4bc9-aec9-064e7bb6807c?i=Q5&o.
           | ..
        
         | basementcat wrote:
         | Much of this information is available from the Mathematics
         | Geneology Project.
         | https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=100193
        
         | ray__ wrote:
         | There is academictree.org, which provides "academic genealogy"
         | for quite a few disciplines-is this the type of tool you're
         | looking for?
        
           | biomcgary wrote:
           | Thank you! I had never looked up my academic genealogy
           | before, which includes Rosalind Franklin, Linus Pauling, and
           | Michael Polanyi.
        
       | searine wrote:
       | https://academictree.org/flytree/ does something similar for
       | genetics or the base site for dozens of other disciplines.
        
       | laurentoget wrote:
       | we are cousins!
        
       | mandevil wrote:
       | 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)
        
       | etrautmann wrote:
       | The field of Neuroscience tends to track lineages with
       | Neurotree.org
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-10-19 23:00 UTC)