Majority of mathematicians hail from 24 “families” of academic advisers
AUG 29, 2016
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.0210069
Nature : Since the 1990s the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) has been building family trees for professional mathematicians based on their doctoral advisers. An analysis performed by Floriana Gargiula of the University of Namur in Belgium and her colleagues has found that of the more than 200 000 mathematicians in the MGP database, 65% can be traced back to just 24 families. The analysis was done by combining the MGP data with information from Wikipedia and the Scopus bibliographic database. Overall, the analysis found 84 distinct families. The largest family, with 56 387 descendants, is headed by 15th-century physician Sigismondo Polcastro.
© 2016 American Institute of Physics
