My Mathematical Genealogy
March 20th, 2007 by SplineGuy
For a long time I have been planning to work up my mathematical genealogy using “The Mathematical Genealogy Project” site. They have the aspirations of documenting the entirety of the genealogy of ALL the mathematicians of the world. I had not heard of the site until after I graduated with my doctorate but was surprised to find quite a few BIG names in my academic heritages. Names like Gauss, Euler, Leibniz, Weierstrass, Hilbert, Poisson, Fourier, Klein, as well as many others.
I have spent more time compiling my heritage than I probably have ought, but you can now download document with it all drawn out:
Dr. Franklin’s Mathematical Genealogy (pdf)
Get back to work! You’re going to get yourself fired!
The next step, clearly, is to find one or more “mathematics genes”. Would that study still be called genealogy?
Given that the human genome shows evidence for recent changes (recent, like 5,000 years ago), it would not surprise me that much if a math gene (set) were discovered.
That said, there are techniques to teach math to the hopelessly math challenged.