
Majority of mathematicians hail from 24 scientific ‘families’ - philip1209
http://www.nature.com/news/majority-of-mathematicians-hail-from-just-24-scientific-families-1.20491
======
jcbeard
It's also about familial/class privilege. Once you get in with a good mentor
(for academics that means advisor)...it sets you up for life. Getting into a
good lab (train under uber mentor X or Y), no matter if your work is crap or
not (definitely not implying elite lab work is poo, simply emphasizing to make
a point) will gain you citations and socialization that a lesser one would
not. Want to find good work from university of Smallville USA (or equiv int'l
uni)...it exists, you just wouldn't know it from the hype. It's nobodies fault
really (except our own), just the way the system is setup. To break out takes
extreme amounts of work, and likely can't happen. So you end up with
entrenched "genealogies" like the one for mathematics. I'd suspect you could
find the same in computer science (despite it being a rather young field) and
computer engineering. Things like double blind conference submissions help,
but even there there is trendiness to consider as a limiting factor. Going
further, breaking out of this rut requires us to disseminate how to get ahead
more than anything else. Who should people talk to? Where should they apply?
What programs are available? What are the best conferences/journals to submit
to? These are all things people in these elite circles have (even if they
don't have the $$ background) which provide them a leg up over everyone else.
How we even the playing field, no idea...it's a monumental task. I for one
start by not caring where somebody went to school, what they look like, what
their gender is, nor how they pronounce things. Can we all do that? I
certainly hope so.

~~~
ThePhysicist
In France this effect is very visible as well. Many of my colleagues at the
CEA (a very good research institute where many people from the French elite
system work) had parents working in research as well, many of them at the same
institutes, and I think if you'd look at the statistics in detail you'd
probably see some strong bias for self selection within the system. That
doesn't mean that the people in the system aren't very good (they usually
are), just that it's very difficult for outsiders to get in. This in turn is
probably due to the lack of knowledge about how the admission system works:
While the centralized tests are of course fair in the sense that everyone gets
the same questions, being well prepared for them takes years of preparation
that already starts by selecting the right school for your children.

What makes me a bit sad here is that there is probably much more scientific
talent out there that we're not tapping into by not providing good study
conditions for everyone, and this is something that we must change.

~~~
diogenescynic
You see the same thing in the US at consulting companies. I've met many
'dynasty' families at consulting companies where the parents worked, children
currently work, and their grandchildren intern at.

------
thearn4
Using the Mathematics Genealogy Project[1], I was able to produce a "family
tree" of my own:

[http://i.imgur.com/HvCI97I.png](http://i.imgur.com/HvCI97I.png)

Graphs produced from many of my peers end up looking very similar, true to the
subject of the article.

It seems that Gauss in particular trained a great many students.

[1]
[https://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/](https://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/)

~~~
ivan_ah
What software did you use for the graph? Looks nice.

~~~
thearn4
I have a Python script that generates it. I have it run every few days via
cronjob, and puts a diff of the old and new graph dotfile in my dropbox if
something new is added to it.

[https://github.com/thearn/math-genealogy](https://github.com/thearn/math-
genealogy)

(note: not the most idiomatic python code, I scrambled to do it quick before a
math conference)

~~~
ivan_ah
Thx. It seems the "nice design" is just removing the bubbles + making edges
bold:

    
    
        digraph genealogy {
            graph [charset="utf-8"];
            node [shape=plaintext];
            edge [style=bold];
            ...
    

I definitely like it better than the default bubbles digraph.

------
c3534l
Serious question, how much does your Ph.D. advisor actually matter? I would
think that the fact that scientific findings are published for everyone to
read would imply that a person gets more of their knowledge from the common
pool than the teachers they worked with. So basically I'm asking if these 24
families are actually meaningful in some way, or just an arbitrary grouping.

~~~
rjtobin
Most of the other replies focus on the unfortunate (and valid) political
aspects: that having an important advisor helps your career via contacts and
higher likelihood of being published in top journals. But I don't think this
is in the spirit of the question asked, which seems to be about whether
someone's advisor has an impact on the sort of work they do (in terms of
'flavor' instead of academic impact).

Definitely the advisor usually has a big role here. Even within a given
subfield, the sort of problems one decides to tackle is a very subjective
thing, and the sort of problems your advisor works on / presents to you has a
big influence on this. Then personal taste gets mixed in, and you get a fairly
unique brand which then influences your own students and so forth (in a
vaguely "genetic" way). And anecdotally, I've heard so often from professors
about how their advisor's take on mathematics has influenced their own, so it
does seems to be a factor.

Honestly though it seems a bit dubious that these 24 "families" share anything
apart from their common ancestor ~500 years ago. If I'm an descendent of
Leibniz and you are a descendent of d'Alembert, I don't think there are any
interesting qualities about our research that we could guess from just that
information. To use the analogy implicit in the article, the "genes" have all
become uniformly distributed through the population by now.

~~~
vidarh
As an example of "flavor" (picked because it's a field I have a particular
interest in; with people I've "followed" peripherally for many years):

Former CTO of Mozilla, Andreas Gal, who wrote TraceMonkey, had professor
Michael Franz as advisor. Gal's thesis was on tracing JITs. Michael Franz had
Niklaus Wirth as advisor. Franz' thesis was on JITs - he contributed a
technique called Semantic Dictionary Encoding, which was added to Oberon to
allow architecture independent binaries. (Franz' thesis pre-dates the public
release of Java by two years). Niklaus Wirth, obviously having a long history
of compilers behind him.

Presumably that's quite unavoidable - most of the dissertations of Wirth's PhD
students I've seen are on compiler technology, for obvious reasons: if you
wanted to study under Wirth badly enough to in many cases move to a different
country in order to do so, presumably odds were good that's where your
interests were. Franz even declined a Fulbright Scholarship in order to
continue studying under Wirth.

He then went on to continue work on code generation in various forms at UC
Irvine - presumably most people, like Gal, seeking him out for a PhD would be
people interested in the same areas.

Of course you will then be influenced - after all you hopefully don't seek out
an adviser to ignore their advice...

------
mollerhoj
The graph reveals what happened to the academic class during the darkest part
of Germanys history: It looks like most of the mathematicians fled to the US!
Also, I thought Russia produced many more matematicans than shown but maybe
I'm just making false assumptions

~~~
S_Daedalus
Under Peter, Russia _imported_ a lot of great minds, who then fled when things
started to get horrible. They've produced some greats, but shockingly few when
you consider how large the country their working with is.

~~~
gaius
Russia is actually not that large population-wise.

~~~
S_Daedalus
More than 140 million is pretty huge, and that's modern Russia, not what it
used to be with all of its empire, and later satellite states.

~~~
gaius
Less than half the population of the US, tho', and only double the UK, you
have to compare like with like.

~~~
S_Daedalus
In what way does that relate to the original point? Russia doesn't have the
record of producing mathematicians at a rate of a much smaller country like
Germany.

~~~
gaius
You asserted that Russia should produce more mathematicians because it is
large. But large mainly empty land area will not have that effect.

~~~
S_Daedalus
You're going backwards. We already did the "per capita" thing, now you're
pretending that you didn't understand what "large" meant in the first place?

I see that you have some kind of problem with what's been said about the
production of great mathematical minds in Russia, so why don't you offer
something contrary to the assertions made so far? Rhetorical gaming is really
not an effective tool to make your point.

~~~
gaius
You said:

 _shockingly few when you consider how large the country their working with
is_

I replied that the country isn't actually that large in terms of people, so
your point is invalid. Now you seem to be saying that empty land should
produce more mathematicians.

Also, it's "they're".

------
mrcactu5
Observe that Gauss was part of the Polcastro family tree. It takes a lot of
clicking to verify as much

[https://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=18230](https://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=18230)
Pfaff

[https://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=18231](https://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=18231)
Gauss

------
SuperGent
First thing this reminded me of was master-student lineages in Buddhists, and
martial arts.

~~~
sn41
There is a long lineage of gurus and students (as far as I understand it, this
is academic lineage, not genetic) in the Hindu Upanishad, Brihadaranyaka:
Chapter II, Section VI [1], ending with Brahman as the ultimate teacher.

There may be similar things in other scriptures as well.

[1] [http://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/the-brihadaranyaka-
up...](http://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/the-brihadaranyaka-
upanishad/d/doc117954.html)

~~~
nsomaru
this might be useful further reading for those interested:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru%E2%80%93shishya_tradition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru%E2%80%93shishya_tradition)

------
kensai
Btw, there is also a Neurotree for Neuroscientists. And I bet there are other
trees as well. :)

[http://neurotree.org/](http://neurotree.org/)

------
searine
This is pretty common.

Us geneticists have used Flytree (later academictree.org) to figure out our
lineages.

[http://academictree.org/](http://academictree.org/)

------
golemotron
By this analysis I wonder whether Ramanujan would be in Hardy's family? In
terms of strength it should be the other way around.

------
Eridrus
This seems like a sort of non-story; what it takes for there to be a new
family tree is someone entering the field without an advisor in this dataset
(i.e. probably an advisor from a different field) and then taking on PhD
students, etc. And that seems unlikely at different points in time for a
variety of different reasons.

------
hasenj
Is there anything similar for computer science?

~~~
goldenkey
Too funny. Why do you think Computer Science is a unique subject of its own?
Its deeply connected to mathematics and the only people doing CS back in the
day were mathematicians. Go read some of Dijkstra's letters from the 50s. They
are publicly available online. If you want to be a code monkey, have fun. But
know that you are second rate to those that know the identities of
computation. Mathematics is everything.

[1] Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist. A theoretical
physicist by training, he worked as a programmer at the Mathematisch Centrum
from 1952 to 1962. Wikipedia

~~~
microtherion
You've certainly reproduced Dijkstra's opinion on the matter faithfully. Given
that his life's work was pretty much to jet between conferences and bad-mouth
those of his colleagues who actually DID produce useful software, it stands to
reason that he would elevate mathematics over engineering.

~~~
random314
Are you talking about the Dijkstra who wrote one of the earliest operating
systems that introduced most of the OS concepts we use today, including mutual
exclusion algorithms, deadlock detection and prevention, kernel/user mode etc
or are you talking about someone else?

~~~
microtherion
While the THE multiprogramming system may have had these, Multics had them
roughly at the same time, and I'm pretty sure today's operating systems trace
their use of these concepts back to Multics, rather than THE.

~~~
random314
Amazing he did all these when jetting between conferences.

Can I quote you as a reference when arguing on the Internet that our OS
concepts do not owe anything to Djikstra, who was only jetting between
conferences? It sounds like you are pretty sure.

------
pzone
This scarcely known researcher Sigusmondo Polcastro at the top of the list
seemed a bit strange. 105,277 descendents, why so many? I looked him up and
clicked through his geneaology. Turns out if follow through a few generations,
you find Carl Friedrich Gauss, with 74930, or about 75% of Mr. Polcastro's
family, and the first name I recognized along that tree. After Gauss you find
a tree of mathemeticians like Bessel, Klein, Hilbert. It seems a bit strange
not to mention him.

------
m_mueller
Interesting that Switzerland had way more math PhDs than France and Austria in
the early 20th. Which part of Austria Hungary was counted? Was this an effect
of the wars?

~~~
mrkgnao
Euler?

~~~
m_mueller
Does a famous mathematician really lead to lots of math PhDs in his home
country, hundreds of years later?

------
awl130
in a tree structure, isn't 24 just an arbitrary number based on which level of
the tree you make your claim? if all of mathematics, for example, can be
traced ultimately to the first mathematician ever, then the argument can be
made that 100% of mathematicians hail from one 'family', or indeed one person.

------
posterboy
That's a mighty peer review ring :P

------
jackmott
Note that title may suggest this is a genetic thing, but this is about the
genealogy of students and teachers, not genetics.

~~~
im4w1l
To further clarify: The teacher is considered the "parent" of the student in
their analysis.

~~~
mysterypie
The result is therefore quite boring. It's like saying famous actors have
worked with other famous actors, and lots of actors can thereby trace their
themselves through a chain of actors back to Charlie Chaplin. (Too bad it
wasn't about genetics -- now _that_ would have been interesting.)

~~~
xapata
The relationship between PhD student and advisor is often much more like
apprentice and master than the relationship between two actors/actresses
working together.

~~~
jamestnz
Indeed, perhaps a more apt analogy from acting would be the many famous actors
who trained under Lee Strasberg (Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman,
Anne Bancroft, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Ellen Burstyn and others).

Strasberg in turn was a student of the ideas of Konstantin Stanislavski[1].

And so it goes.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_acting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_acting)

------
hackuser
How do they define "family"? I tried to find that in the article, but didn't
see it (and didn't read every word in order to discover it).

Colloquially, you might say two families are distinct if there are no
marriages or blood ties between them. But if you go back far enough, are there
any distinct families by that definition, especially within one country or
region?

EDIT: Nevermind. I can see how, by limiting relationships to one advisor
relationship for each person, there would be more distinct families (or in
another language, disconnected graphs).

~~~
mixedmath
Advisor-Advisee relationships now. I'm a math PhD student, and I can trace my
"mathematical family" back to each of Newton, Leibniz, and the physician
mentioned in the article Sigismondo Polcastro. What I learn from looking at my
family tree is that it's quite interconnected. The additional relationships
come from students who claim more than one advisor (like almost all of Hardy
and Littlewood's students, for instance) or students who got multiple PhDs and
therefore have multiple advisors.

