According to Wikipedia,
an academic
genealogy ``organizes a family tree of scientists and scholars according
to dissertation supervision relationships.'' This can also be generalized to
scientific mentoring relationships other than dissertation supervision.
There are a number of people whom I see as my
mentors. The
genealogy of my doctoral dissertation adviser Joseph W. Goodman, and thus
my genealogy, was researched by Pablo Irarrazaval for Albert Macovski, one of
Goodman's early students. It is a genealogy that wholly remains in the USA,
terminating around what I believe to be the beginnings of formal education
there. Among the names appearing are Frederick Terman (one of the founders of
Silicon Valley), Vannevar Bush (US science administrator during World War II),
Percy Williams Bridgman (Nobel Prize 1946), and Arthur E. Kennelly
(who worked with Thomas Edison). Goodman also appears in the
Mathematics Genealogy
Project database, but only as a
not very
well-constructed entry.
My earlier work at Stanford was supervised by Lambertus Hesselink.
Backtracking
his genealogy in the Mathematics Genealogy Project, one encounters names
such as Klein (1868), Lipschitz (1853), Dirichlet (1827), Bessel (1810),
Poisson (1800), Fourier (?), Gauss (1799), Lagrange (1754), Laplace (?),
Euler (1726), d'Alembert (?), Bernoulli (1684), Malebranche (1672),
Leibniz (1666), Snellius (1607), and Copernicus (1499).
Dates are that of dissertation or degree.
The earliest dissertation date I could track in this tree is 1363.
There are also many familiar names that appear as distant grand cousins.
For another example of this kind, see
the genealogy of Billur Barshan, which also features similar names.
Further information on these lineages can be found
in the Wikipedia page Academic genealogy of theoretical physicists
It seems that in earlier times the research community was small, and
most scientists were related. Therefore, a large group of present-day
scientists can trace their origins to a relatively small number of names
such as those listed above.
It is interesting to observe that while later dissertations are
scientific or at least philosophical in content, earlier ones are
theological, reflecting the gradual transition of institutions of learning
from religious ones to scientific ones. Indeed some interim figures have two
dissertations, one theological, one scientific.
After completing my PhD, I worked at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg
with Adolf W. Lohmann.
His genealogy in the Mathematics Genealogy Project, like that of Goodman,
is not well constructed. Another person I consider my mentor is David
A. B. Miller, with whom I worked with for a short period at AT&T Bell Labs
(later Lucent Technologies and Alcatel-Lucent). Unfortunately I do not have
any further information regarding the genealogies of Lohmann and Miller.
Of related interest to academic genealogies is the
Collaboration Distance. Inspired by the
Erdős number,
this tells your connection to other authors. If author A is a coauthor with
author B, their distance is 1. If author C is coauthor with B, but not directly
with A, the distance of A to C is 2, and so on. My distance to Erdős, as well
as many major figures of the twentieth century (such as Einstein, Dirac,
Schrödinger, Feynman, Shannon, Chomsky), is usually 4-6.
My distance to Gauss, as an example of an earlier figure, is 7.
(Thanks to Emre Güven for pointing out the collaboration distance link.)
Needless to say, it would be unwise to judge the worth of any individual,
either positively or negatively, based on their academic (or familial)
genealogy.