The Mathematics Genealogy Project is an online service that lets you explore the academic lineage of mathematicians and those in related areas such as engineering. Using it, I discovered that I descend from Hermann von Helmholtz, famous for his work in acoustics (and a whole lot of other stuff).
It is interesting to see how thesis topics evolve from advisor to advisee, yet my research area — music information retrieval — is not so removed from Helmholtz’s work on acoustics; in fact, MIR scholars still cite and recognize his contributions!
Here are the people that make up my lineage since Helmholtz, each person’s dissertation title, place of graduate study, and graduation year.
- Hermann von Helmholtz, De fabrica systematis nervosi evertebratorum, Universität Berlin, 1842.
- Edward Leamington Nichols, Ueber das von glühendem Platin ausgestrahlte Licht: Ein Beitrag zur allgemeinen Ausstrahlungslehr, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 1879.
- Ernest Fox Nichols, Radiometric Researches in the Remote Infra-Red Spectrum, Cornell, 1897.
- Frederic Columbus Blake, The Reflection and Transmission of Electric Waves by Screens of Resonators and by Grids, Columbia, 1906.
- William Littell Everitt, The Calculation and Design of Alternating Current Networks Employing Triodes Operating During a Portion of a Cycle, Ohio State, 1933.
- Karl Ralph Spangenberg, The Effect of Grid Current Flow Upon the Dynamic Characteristics of Vacuum Tube Power, Ohio State, 1937.
- Willis Harman, Tunable Waveguide Cavity Resonators for Broadband Operation of Reflex Klystrons, Stanford, 1948.
- John Bowman Thomas, On the Statistical Design of Demodulation Systems for Signals in Additive Noise, Stanford, 1955.
- Kung Yao, On Some Representations and Sampling Expansions for Band Limited Signals, Princeton, 1965.
- K. J. Ray Liu, Efficient and Reliable Parallel Processing Algorithms and Architectures for Modern Signal Processing, UCLA, 1990.
- Steve Tjoa, Sparse and Nonnegative Factorizations for Music Understanding, Maryland, 2011.
