On The Perpetuation Of Varieties and Species

October 29, 2017 9:28 PM

On The Origin Of Theses following the The Academic Family Tree, a nonprofit, user content-driven web database that aims to accurately document and publicly share the academic genealogy of current and historical researchers across all fields of academia. Started with Neurotree. See also the Mathematics Geneaology Project and the Philosophy Family Tree

some thoughts:
As you can see, I have some distinguished ancestors. In particular, my great-grandfather (academically speaking) was Paul Dirac…
Your Academic Geneology
More importantly, following up some of these lines of descent (with many common or overlapping origins) drives home that science is a human endeavor. It is composed of a large yet very finite human population.
Majority of mathematicians hail from just 24 scientific ‘families’

Similarly, the further one moved from the 19th century, the more fuzzy became the definition of what constitutes a "PhD thesis advisor." [One entrant listed his ultimate ancestor as "God," but this was deemed inadmissible since everyone knows that God does not even have tenure, never mind a PhD.]

posted by the man of twists and turns (18 comments total)

the economics version
posted by dismas at 9:31 PM on October 29, 2017

Bob Solow is my great great academic grandpa!
posted by dismas at 9:34 PM on October 29, 2017

This is exciting. I've wanted to do this ever since seeing such a genealogy framed on the wall of a friend's office, but unfortunate circumstances made it impossible for me to ask my own PhD advisor about whom his mentor had worked for. He's not listed—I'll have to correct that—but his mentor is, so now I can see my own whole academic family tree. Thank you for posting this.
posted by artistic verisimilitude at 10:04 PM on October 29, 2017

Exciting project, I hope it goes far... Sadly most of my attempts to find computer security academic trees ended in failure. The manual nature of the project seems limiting.
posted by el io at 10:09 PM on October 29, 2017

Given that my graduate career didn't even progress to the point of a thesis advisor, I suppose that makes me some unfertalized egg, sloughed out of academia before I was conceived.
posted by vorpal bunny at 10:14 PM on October 29, 2017

Cool! I'm in there!
posted by k8t at 11:06 PM on October 29, 2017

I kept going up the tree and somehow ended up at Jesus
posted by destrius at 11:33 PM on October 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm an academic great grandchild of Chomsky and Jakobson. But at the great grandchild level, so are a hell of a lot of other people, I guess. Still, I can pretend to feel important.
posted by lollusc at 12:06 AM on October 30, 2017

academia has enough of a problem with brand name researchers getting mediocre work hyped in top journals that stuff like this bugs me.

on the other hand very cool and fascinating.
posted by vogon_poet at 3:02 AM on October 30, 2017

Here's why God didn't get tenure.
posted by madcaptenor at 5:10 AM on October 30, 2017

I really like the academic phylogeny of physical anthropology.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:16 AM on October 30, 2017

Spooky to find that I’m on here. Also, a little sad to realize that I won’t have any “children” because I don’t have any grad students. I guess I am a godmother to my undergraduate advisees?
posted by BrashTech at 7:26 AM on October 30, 2017

It perhaps unsurprisingly doesn’t have nearly the information that the Mathematics Genealogy Project has. I’m in there, as is my supervisor, but that’s where it stops.
posted by leahwrenn at 9:00 AM on October 30, 2017

leahwrenn: same for the econ geneology. My adviser is on there, his adviser is on there, but her adviser is not, despite she and her adviser both being pretty prominent in their field. My guess is it wouldn't take much to scrape the RepEc geneology to add it, though.
posted by dismas at 9:05 AM on October 30, 2017

Gives new meaning to the term "Doktorvater".
posted by pleasant_confusion at 11:29 AM on October 30, 2017

I'm on there, but oddly, on the Terrestrial Ecology tree, because apparently the tree creators only recognize terrestrial and marine ecology so all freshwater scientists are just lumped into terrestrial and that is an abomination. Also, I am my own cousin because my masters and doctoral advisors had the same doctoral advisor.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:27 PM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

My advisor's advisor is there, but my advisor's advisor's advisor is a question mark. Maybe I'll make some inquiries.
posted by rlk at 4:30 PM on October 30, 2017

tree creators only recognize terrestrial and marine ecology

Sounds like they're too littoral.
posted by biogeo at 7:37 AM on October 31, 2017 [3 favorites]