Academic Genealogy

Since genealogy is trendy and the weather on Paris is a bit gloomy I played a little with the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

The aim of this project is to trace back the scientific lineage of "all" mathematicians throughout history. The main link considered is the "student - advisor" relationship, though sometimes looser relations are taken into account like "student - professor" (for mere lectures or mail correspondence, even when a PhD or a specific degree is not at stake) or even brotherhood (as for the Bernoulli brothers -- Jacob and Johann -  who actually worked hand in hand during their studies)

Here, I tried to follow my scientific legacy starting with my PhD advisor Dominque Jeulin, his own advisor Jean Serra, himself having had Georges Matheron as advisor, and so on...

Lévy, Hermite, Chasles, Poisson, Laplace, Lagrange, Euler... not so bad :) . On the  generated tree, I stopped at the Bernoulli brothers but happily a big part of this tree is common with John D. Cook's which goes further back, notably passing by Erasmus and Mersenne.

Along with the links  also displayed the corresponding years and countries to get a grasp of what kind journey into time and space the whole thing amounted to. The "looser links" are also represented with dashed arrows and a "~" prefixed to the year.

Interestingly, this kind of genealogical info is also available for other scientific domain for instance on academictree.org

 Do it yourself !

For those who would like to do the same:

• the Python script generating the full graph (in SVG) taking a "simple" text file as input
• the text file with my genealogical data that gives an idea of the format expected by the script (( and yes the data was collected by hand, which is probably one of the most interesting part of the experiment with all the wikipedia checking that curiosity requires along the way ))