[PLUG-TALK] Mathematical Geneologies

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Tue Aug 25 22:36:45 UTC 2009


> 
> On Thu, 20 Aug 2009, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> >http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/
> >
> >No, not the bio kind, students and teachers.  The connections between 
> >130,000 or so mathematicians, back to Gauss and Euler, up to current 
> >grad students.  Fun to search around in.

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 08:08:53AM -0500, Jeme A Brelin wrote:
> Oh, it goes back much, much further than Gauss and Euler.  For instance, 
> my likely advisor candidates (I'm in the process of choosing a new 
> direction since bone cancer took my former advisor) can be traced back to 
> folks like Heinrich Von Langenstein <URL: http://bit.ly/JueDw > and 
> Demetrios Kydones <URL: http://bit.ly/2vOcU5 >.

And I imagine that Mormon mathematicians trace their geneologies back
to Adam.  The two fellows you mentioned showed up, but I assumed that
(1) nobody heard of them, and (2) they were primarily theologians and
politicians.  Whereas Gauss and Euler are da bomb.   Leibnitz and 
Bernoulli and Mersenne show up in the path to Euler, perhaps I should
have mentioned them, but why mention mere giants when you can name
drop the titans of mathematics?

I would love to see math geneologies that went to al-Khwarizmi or one
of the other Arab scholars that rejuvenated mathematics and developed
algebra in 800's CE.  Unfortunately, that scholarly tradition went
moribund with the late Ottoman empire.  Still, it might be fun if a
western university imported a Muslim mathematician or two, if any can
trace their geneology back to these earlier mathematicians, simply
to get 500 years of extra brag rights about their deep mathematical
roots.  I imagine the Romans managed to kill off all the scholars 
that could trace their roots back to the Greeks, and things really
didn't get restarted in the West until we started reading translations
of the Arab works.

BTW, Jeme, remind us of what kind of math you are doing.  I'm slowly
re-teaching myself vector calculus and analysis, preparing to tackle
some advanced mechanics papers to either find flaws in them, or some
simulations that disagree with them.   Lagrange-Dirichlet versus the
spawn of Nyquist - fight!

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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