Monday, May 9, 2011

Learning my academic lineage

I must be getting old. Often as people get older they start to trace their family genealogy to learn "where they came from". I had been told since I was a child that my paternal great-great-grandfather was  Samuel Shannon, one of the first Jewish settlers in Australia.

But, I had heard that scientists sometimes like to trace their academic lineage, where their Ph.D advisor is their parent, and the advisor of their advisor is their grandparent, and so on. Indeed there is a Mathematics Genealogy project which traces everyone back to Euler and Gauss...

So I got intrigued and checked out my own lineage. I was oblivious to this, beyond who my "great-grandfather" was. But, I did not know he had such a distinguished lineage. Finding the rest of my lineage was quite easy using Wikipedia because it listed the advisors of most of my "forebears". Here is the line:

Helmholtz
Arthur Webster (Founder of the American Physical Society)
Albert Wills
Isidor Rabi
Julian Schwinger
Walter Kohn
Vinay Ambegaokar
Joe Serene
Jim Sauls
Ross McKenzie

1 comment:

  1. My Lineage -

    Gusztáv Buchböck
    Michael Polanyi
    Eugene Wigner
    John Bardeen
    J Robert Schrieffer
    John W Wilkins
    Daniel Cox

    The trail goes cold with Buchboeck!

    ReplyDelete

From Leo Szilard to the Tasmanian wilderness

Richard Flanagan is an esteemed Australian writer. My son recently gave our family a copy of Flanagan's recent book, Question 7 . It is...