My friend Maccanena has this unique superhero-like serendipity that makes her stumble upon the most interesting of websites. If it weren't for the fact that she immediately sends me the links to these interesting sites, I'd be extremely jealous of her powers.
Today, she stumbled across this treasure-trove of a site (for ignoring what we were supposed to do and go on a link-clicking-spree, that is) for math and science geeks like me. Trying to schedule her PhD defense she came across the mathematical lineage page of a professor in University of Maryland, College Park. The mathematical lineage was traced all the way back to Lagrange via people like Courant, Hilbert, Dirichlet, Poisson and Fourier! Now if that array of names didn't make your jaw just drop onto the keyboard, a la Jim Carrey's in the movie The Mask when he saw Cameron Diaz, then you sir (or madam as the case may be) are no geek or have ice water running in your veins.
Needless, to say the geeks in us were extremely amused and excited about it wondering what great scientists we might be linked to. The link provided at the end of the page didn't work, but a simple search of mathematics genealogy quickly led me to The Mathematics Genealogy Project. Now while the page says Mathematics, it is much broader than the general "math" that most people are used to.
A search of the database for Lagrange yields a connection to Euler (more as an intellectual link and not as a thesis advisor) and from there on to Bernoulli. Somewhere along the line Kronecker also was featured. Now to find other Fluid Dynamics greats in the list... I fear much of the rest of the day, and probably the next few days will be wasted in tracing the genealogy and possibly reading the original papers and dissertations from famous scientists and mathematicians. This happened once before when I came across the original paper on Reynolds number which was reprinted for Osborne Reynolds' birthday a couple of years ago.
Talking about genealogy, I am reminded that the place where I work has an apple tree which is purported to be the direct descendant of the apple tree that Sir Isaac Newton was sitting under when an apple fell on his head and led to the theory of gravity. Thought whoever is reading this would like to know.
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1 comment:
I am glad that at least one of us, the one not defending his thesis within a month, is taking advantage of this super-cool discovery. Remind me to spend some of my deserved break time after I finish tracing my own genealogy.
Perhaps some great grandfather can help us overcome the disappointment of our direct ancestors ;)
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