The Mathematics Genealogy Project records Ph. D. mathematicians and their thesis supervisors. Recently they've relaxed the "thesis supervisor" to include advisors of various sorts, which allows them to extend their records back to the Middle Ages.
Of course, I couldn't resist looking at my own record. (It's incomplete; they don't list 2 of my Ph. D. students.) Some of my supervisory ancestors include:
Saunders MacLane - 3
Hermann Weyl - 4
David Hilbert - 5
Felix Klein, Georg Frobenius, Lindemann - 6
Kummer, Weierstrass - 7
Jacobi, Dirichlet - 8
Fourier - 9
Gauss, Lagrange, Laplace - 10
Euler - 11
Leibniz - 14
Huygens - 15
Mersenne - 17
Copernicus - 23
Here the numbers indicate the number of links it takes to get to that person. Assuming that each student has shaken the hand of their supervisor, I find it neat to think that only 23 handshakes separate me from Copernicus. Of course, I'm not very special in this regard, as lots and lots of mathematicians have illustrious forbears. The database, for example, currently lists 53,775 descendants for Copernicus, or about 38% of all the people listed.
My wife's tree might even be more prestigious. She's got Newton at level 14, and Galileo at 17.
Showing posts with label genealogy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genealogy. Show all posts
Friday, March 26, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
My Genetic Journey (Part 2)
About a year and a half ago, I got a kit from National Geographic's Genographic Project to determine my paternal "deep ancestry", and I talked about the results here.
This year I got a kit to do my maternal line, through mitochondrial DNA, and the results are depicted below:
No real surprise: I am a member of haplogroup H, the most common mitochondrial haplogroup in Europe. My great-grandmother was Emma Hesburn Dean, whose ancestors likely came from England or Ireland. (I don't know more because she was adopted at an early age, and I've been unable to locate her parents, who are said on her death certificate to be Charles Dean and Barbara Hall, in any genealogical records.)
Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent common ancestor (along the female line) of all humans, probably lived about 150,000 years ago in East Africa. From there, mutations in the particular region of mitochondrial DNA suggest the following line of descent: L1/L0 -> L2 -> L3 -> N -> R -> pre-HV -> HV -> H. L3 corresponds to the first humans to have left Africa. N lived in the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. HV corresponds to Turkey and Georgia. Finally H corresponds to the rise of the Aurignacian culture in Western Europe. H probably arrived in Europe about 30,000 years ago. My maternal ancestors probably lived in England or Ireland for thousands of years before emigrating to the US - perhaps in the 1800's.
This year I got a kit to do my maternal line, through mitochondrial DNA, and the results are depicted below:
No real surprise: I am a member of haplogroup H, the most common mitochondrial haplogroup in Europe. My great-grandmother was Emma Hesburn Dean, whose ancestors likely came from England or Ireland. (I don't know more because she was adopted at an early age, and I've been unable to locate her parents, who are said on her death certificate to be Charles Dean and Barbara Hall, in any genealogical records.)
Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent common ancestor (along the female line) of all humans, probably lived about 150,000 years ago in East Africa. From there, mutations in the particular region of mitochondrial DNA suggest the following line of descent: L1/L0 -> L2 -> L3 -> N -> R -> pre-HV -> HV -> H. L3 corresponds to the first humans to have left Africa. N lived in the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. HV corresponds to Turkey and Georgia. Finally H corresponds to the rise of the Aurignacian culture in Western Europe. H probably arrived in Europe about 30,000 years ago. My maternal ancestors probably lived in England or Ireland for thousands of years before emigrating to the US - perhaps in the 1800's.
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