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[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045308/ideas-that-created-th... [2] https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/
This reminded of a book that I read a while ago. It listed the important ideas that lead to modern computer science in a chronological manner[1]. Is there any work done to trace the genealogy of computer science like [2]? [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262045308/ideas-that-created-th... [2] https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/
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I feel that the possibility of tracing academic lineage back to antiquity in the West is very dim, for the same reason that tracing descent from antiquity[0] in Europe has proven impossible - too few records survived. Even in the Catholic Church, the longest unbroken chain (i.e., for which records survive) of apostolic succession (i.e., which bishop consecrated each bishop) goes only back to the 1400s with Guillaume…
I’ve always wondered what things we’ve lost from library fires, hall burnings, church burnings etc. perhaps this is one such example
One thing to note is that there seems to be a compounding difficulty of preserving records. Eg we don’t have much science or mathematics from anything like late antiquity but somehow the Hagia Sophia was built in 537. If you look at the evidence that people were still capable of the kind of analysis required to build that structure it seems plausible that much mathematics or science was still happening (in the eastern Roman Empire) but not being recorded. Perhaps if you are copying books you’re more likely to be copying the important ancient foundational texts rather than more advanced narrower more recent things. There’s like 7-800 years between Apollonius and the construction of that church. I do wonder what mathematics was done in that time but not recorded. But it also may be that the culture around mathematics was somehow limited with no (evidence of anything like) algebra or calculus or coordinate systems which are pretty important to the developments in the last few hundred years of mathematics.
Early western Christianity was pretty bad for preserving ancient texts (a silly and likely exaggerated way to phrase the attitude is something like ‘if it’s compatible with the bible it is unnecessary and if it disagrees with the bible it’s heresy and should be destroyed’ though it also seems the New Testament is somewhat Aristotelian) but the eastern empire kept many of them going (in their original Greek), and the Muslims ended up with Arabic translations and Western Europe then got copies or contemporary Arabic works through what is now Spain and translated them into Latin (this could be somewhat tricky for mathematics but worse for anything more philosophical which would have likely been changed first to be compatible with Islam and second to be compatible with Roman Catholicism).[1] Eventually scholars in the west also got access to the Greek texts from the Byzantine empire and the attitudes towards censorship had changed (I guess it was less necessary for things that were not in the vernacular) and it was perhaps lucky that this happened before the fall of Constantinople.
[1] apart from destruction there are also things that are lost due to there being a lot of texts and not that many people looking at them. Eg I think there’s a big library associated with the bishop of toledo (maybe a cathedral or seminary library; maybe in a bishops palace) which is full of Arabic texts from before the rechristianization of Spain. There may be texts there which are unknown to modern scholars.
I spent some time in 02016 digging through different sorts of academic lineages. It turns out, for example, that you can also trace Leibniz back to Copernicus: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/academic-lineage.html Thrun's page seems to have an error about Leibniz: "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1966, 1967, 1976" It would be nice to be able to trace figures like al-Tusi back to Plato and Imhotep, to know if there really…
I feel that the possibility of tracing academic lineage back to antiquity in the West is very dim, for the same reason that tracing descent from antiquity[0] in Europe has proven impossible - too few records survived. Even in the Catholic Church, the longest unbroken chain (i.e., for which records survive) of apostolic succession (i.e., which bishop consecrated each bishop) goes only back to the 1400s with Guillaume…
Our (Episcopal) parish used to have a small framed "genealogy" that purported to trace our diocesan bishop's consecration lineage back to St. Peter. I was always a bit skeptical.
Tangent: Some Roman Catholics would flatly deny the validity of any Anglican ordinations post-Henry VIII ....
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How does it help to create a Y100k problem by using fixed-width numerals with five digits, instead of using variable-width numerals like we normally do for years ?
exactly, it seems like a faulty solution to a problem that doesn't exist -- at present, we would say 900 and 1, not 0900 and 0001.
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what do you mean by "incestuous"? I'm having a hard time picturing the tree structure. Like if we keep things simple and assume every person on the tree "asexually spawns" multiple students, where does the "incest" come in? Maybe one student having more than one advisor? If that's the case, usually it's just a thesis committee or reviewer or something, and not really multiple _main_ advisors
> what do you mean by "incestuous"? To give you an example, about half of my group at University X did a Bachelor's in statistics at University X, then a Mater's in statistics at University X, then a PhD in statistics at University X, and some are even doing a PostDoc (in statistics at University X)!
I spent some time in 02016 digging through different sorts of academic lineages. It turns out, for example, that you can also trace Leibniz back to Copernicus: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/academic-lineage.html Thrun's page seems to have an error about Leibniz: "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1966, 1967, 1976" It would be nice to be able to trace figures like al-Tusi back to Plato and Imhotep, to know if there really…
Can you provide a reference for the claim that the concept of a freely postulated axiom system was implicit in Eudoxus? I'm very curious! I assume the 19th century rediscovery you refer to was Boole, Hamilton et al and their work in logic and the beginnings of abstract algebra.
He just needs to make a movie with Kevin Bacon and publish with Erdos to round things out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_numbe...
Ha! Erdős–Bacon numbers originated in a 2002 Telegraph article by Simon Singh, referenced by Wikipedia as [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20121112081753/http://www.telegr... I came up with this game after realizing I had an Erdős–Bacon number. He credits me, but spun the article to make this sound like a "thing" other people cared about. I was written out of that Wikipedia page long ago. Very little of what survives…