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My PhD Genealogy

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Re: My PhD Genealogy

#2

Post by josters »

I really like the simplicity of this.

I suppose this was done by hand. Having such an overview while doing the research would be really beneficial for discovering novel ideas and connections. I haven't come across such a tool as of yet.

Re: My PhD Genealogy

#3

Post by motoboi »

josters wrote: post #2

I really like the simplicity of this. I suppose this was done by hand. Having such an overview while doing the research would be really beneficial for discovering novel ideas and connections. I haven't come across such a tool as of yet.

I would love to have an ideas and people genealogy where you can select a thinker like Rousseau and have a graph of the main ideas in his works and their predecessors.

Think about his amour de soi. Did it existed previously anywhere else? Who talked about something similar earlier?

I'd die for something like that.

Re: My PhD Genealogy

#4

Post by basementcat »

josters wrote: post #2

I really like the simplicity of this. I suppose this was done by hand. Having such an overview while doing the research would be really beneficial for discovering novel ideas and connections. I haven't come across such a tool as of yet.

Much of this information is available from the Mathematics Geneology Project. https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=100193

Re: My PhD Genealogy

#7

Post by ray__ »

josters wrote: post #2

I really like the simplicity of this. I suppose this was done by hand. Having such an overview while doing the research would be really beneficial for discovering novel ideas and connections. I haven't come across such a tool as of yet.

There is academictree.org, which provides "academic genealogy" for quite a few disciplines–is this the type of tool you're looking for?

Re: My PhD Genealogy

#8

Post by kragen »

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 was an unbroken line of personal mentorship the way there is in the Buddhist lineages, or if at some point the oral line was severed. Perhaps during the Roman rampages through Greece, the line of transmission of philosophy only survived in Alexandria, or less plausibly, somewhere in India, only to resurface in Arabia while Europe was sunken into its Dark Ages. Or perhaps it had to be recovered from the few manuscripts the Christians hadn't yet recycled into hymnals, like the Archimedes Palimpsest.

We know that somewhere between Eudoxus and Galileo the idea of freely postulated axiom systems was lost, and it was not really fully rediscovered until the 19th century.

Re: My PhD Genealogy

#10

Post by mandevil »

You can really see the results of the ebbs and flows of generations in this genealogy. The massive post-war three part economic, technological, and population booms just jumps out of this data. Ph.D's granted in this genalogy, per decade. 1870's: 1 1880's: 2 1890's: 0 1900's: 3 1910's: 0 (they were fighting a war, no time for dissertations) 1920's: 2 1930's: 2 1940's: 1 (They were fighting a war, no time for dissertations) 1950's: 0 (Baby bust from the great depression) 1960's: 4 (The intra-war and postwar kids, with funding and jobs) 1970's: 2 1980's: 0 (Too soon to be have their own students for a 1995 Ph.D)
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