Mathematics Genealogy Project

The Mathematics Genealogy Project is a freely accessible database on the Internet with the aim of recording as many dissertations as possible in mathematics and related fields such as theoretical physics and linking them to form an academic family tree. The project was initiated in 1996 by Harry Coonce.

The names of the author and the supervisor (doctoral advisor), the year, the university, and the title of the dissertation are entered into this database, which is housed at North Dakota State University. For older times, when doctoral degrees were not standard, other degrees are entered, or simply teacher-student relationships, as between Leonhard Euler and Joseph-Louis Lagrange. In this family tree, the relationship between doctoral supervisor and doctoral student represents the scientific kinship.

In March 2017, when the project had over 200,000 entries, it could be seen, for example, that Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) now has more than 77,000 "mathematical descendants", and Luca Pacioli (1445-1517) has more than 130,000. In Pacioli's line are Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Jakob I Bernoulli (1655-1705) and Leonhard Euler (1707-1783). Another interesting line begins with Niccolò Tartaglia, who was self-taught, and leads through Ostilio Ricci, Galileo Galilei, his pupil Benedetto Castelli and Vincenzo Viviani to Isaac Barrow, Isaac Newton, Roger Cotes and on to George Gabriel Stokes, James Clerk Maxwell, Arthur Cayley, John William Strutt, Ernest Rutherford, Edward Victor Appleton, Paul Langevin, Hans Geiger and Douglas Rayner Hartree. Conversely, most of today's scientists can be traced back to a few ancestors.

See also

• Theoretical Chemistry Genealogy Project