{"id":1475,"date":"2011-06-02T12:12:21","date_gmt":"2011-06-02T16:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=1475"},"modified":"2011-06-02T12:12:21","modified_gmt":"2011-06-02T16:12:21","slug":"on-the-shoulders-of-giants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/06\/02\/on-the-shoulders-of-giants\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Shoulders of Giants"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday<\/a> I was messing around with The Mathematics Genealogy Project<\/a> and I learned that Anna Nagurney<\/a>, among others, is a not-so-distant cousin.\u00a0 That inspired me to shoot off a couple of emails trying to trace my history farther back.<\/p>\n

To recap, my advisors were Don Ratliff and John Bartholdi.\u00a0 John was a student of Don, so Don is both my father and grandfather, a situation that would certainly raise eyebrows outside of academia.\u00a0 Don’s advisor was Manny Bellmore who did a lot of fundamental work in the late 1960s and 70s on the traveling salesman problem and various other optimization problems.\u00a0 Manny’s advisor was Frederick (Tom) Sparrow, who did extensive work in energy modeling and policy, among other things.\u00a0 Bellmore also worked with George Nemhauser, but George was on leave in England when Manny graduated, so Sparrow was the advisor.\u00a0 It is through Sparrow that I am related to Nagurney.<\/p>\n

To continue earlier in history, I shot off an email to Tom, who is emeritus from Purdue.\u00a0 Fortunately my email got through the spam filters (starting an email “Hello Great-Grandfather” does make it sound like a plea from a Nigerian prince), and he could tell me about his advisors.\u00a0 He had two\u00a0 The first was an economist named Kenneth Boulding<\/a>.\u00a0 This is a name I should know but do not.\u00a0 He did some fundamental work in systems science and conflict analysis starting in the mid-1950s with some papers that are incredibly well cited<\/a>.\u00a0 When the wikipedia description begins with:<\/p>\n

Kenneth Ewart Boulding (January 18, 1910 \u2013 March 18, 1993) was an economist<\/a>, educator, peace activist, poet<\/a>, religious mystic<\/a>, devoted Quaker<\/a>, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

it is clear we are talking about someone unusually interesting.<\/p>\n

Tom’s other advisor is, however, known to me (as it is to many in operations research):\u00a0 Merrill Flood<\/a> (1908-1991).\u00a0 Flood was a founder of the field of operations research.\u00a0 He worked on transportation problems in the 1930s and developed the “Northwest Corner” rule for finding a solution to such problems, before Dantzig developed a general method for optimizing these problems.\u00a0 He also was an early researcher on the game-theory problem Prisoner’s Dilemma.\u00a0 He was also an influential popularizer of the Traveling Salesman Problem.\u00a0\u00a0 He was the second President of TIMS<\/a>, and he received the Kimball Medal<\/a> for services to the field (a designation I have the honor to share with him).<\/p>\n

Flood happens to be in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (though without listed advisees) and his advisor was Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn<\/a> (1882-1948), Scottish-born algebraist who taught at Princeton for most of his career.\u00a0 Wedderburn’s advisor was George Chrystal<\/a> (1851-1911),\u00a0 whose advisor was James Clerk Maxwell<\/a> (1831-1879), father of electromagnetic theory!\u00a0 Checking out his wikipedia article leads to the immortal verse:<\/p>\n

Gin a body meet a body<\/em>
\nFlyin’ through the air.
\nGin a body hit a body,
\nWill it fly? And where?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Going back from Maxwell, we get William Hopkins<\/a> (1793-1866), who combined mathematics with geology.\u00a0 I love the wikipedia entry on his private life:<\/p>\n

Hopkins enjoyed music<\/a>, poetry<\/a> and landscape painting<\/a>. He spent the end of his life in a lunatic asylum<\/a> in Stoke Newington<\/a>. He died there of chronic mania<\/a> and exhaustion<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps not an unusual ending for mathematicians.<\/p>\n

Back from there we get Adam Sedgwick<\/a> (1785-1873), a founder of geology.\u00a0 He had two advisors:\u00a0 Thomas Jones<\/a> (1756-1807) and John Dawson<\/a> (1734\u20131820), a mathematician and surgeon.\u00a0 Dawson leads to Edward Waring<\/a> (1736-1798), a Lusasian Professor of Mathematics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the Jones side, we get two advisors: John Cranke<\/a> (1746-1816) and Thomas Postlethwaite<\/a> (1731-1798).\u00a0 Fortunately Cranke was the student of Postlethwaite, so we don’t branch (making an already large lineage even bushier).\u00a0 At this point we hit two Cambridge tutors:\u00a0 Stephen Whisson<\/a> (?-1783) and Walter Taylor<\/a> (c1700-1743).\u00a0 Taylor was trained by Robert Smith<\/a> (1689-1768), known as Old Focus for his work in optics.\u00a0 Smith leads to Roger Cotes (1682-1716), who worked closely with his advisor… Sir Isaac Newton<\/a>!\u00a0 That makes Sir Isaac my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather (academically speaking).<\/p>\n

From Philosophi\u00e6 Naturalis Principia Mathematica<\/a> <\/em>to A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field<\/a><\/em> to trying to schedule 8 team sports leagues<\/a> in a mere 15 generations. On the shoulders of giants indeed!<\/p>\n

I suspect that if the system was completely filled in, we would all be descendants of Newton.\u00a0 But I am walking a little taller today, and feeling a bit more pressure in my research, knowing of my illustrious ancestors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I was messing around with The Mathematics Genealogy Project and I learned that Anna Nagurney, among others, is a not-so-distant cousin.\u00a0 That inspired me to shoot off a couple of emails trying to trace my history farther back. To recap, my advisors were Don Ratliff and John Bartholdi.\u00a0 John was a student of Don, … Continue reading “On the Shoulders of Giants”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,40,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-people","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}