I just finished my academic genealogy, which I intend to present to my student who defends his dissertation tomorrow. I got back to before the Enlightenment for two branches, and the third got stuck at Gustav Fechner. I found Fechner's thesis and a nice librarian sent me the first few pages, but I can't read Latin. Any volunteers?
It was very time consuming, very educational, and very fun. Not only did I learn a lot of history of my own discipline, but I learned a lot about my library's databases. If you want to do it yourself, you should check out the Mathematics Genealogy Project, the Chemical Genealogy, Dissertation Abstracts Online, the Philosophy Family Tree, and (most important) WorldCat, the World Library Catalog from OCLC.
Thursday, September 15, 2005
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7 comments:
I would just like to say that this post prompted me to figure out whether I have an Erdos number, and the answer is yes. My Erdos number is 6.
I did it too. Mine is 4. (Ha!)
Hee, I'm just excited that as a humanities person I know what that is! (A former colleague in CSci explained it to me once. He was excited when a student raised his Erdos number.) But I definitely don't have one!
(I actually can read some of that Latin, but I'm not sure what you want to know from it, and the second picture's hard to read. It looks like an exceedingly flowery dedication to various German potentates, but that's just on a rough glance.)
I would be pissed if somebody raised my Erdos number. (We count the least number of authors connecting us and Erdos, so lower is better.) Someone in my department makes it a hobby to ask newcomers what their Erdos numbers are, just to slip in (oh so very casually) that he co-authored with Erdos on multiple occasions.
-- X
Your Erdos number can't be raised, unless you retract the pub that made it small, yes? I think New Kid meant that the colleague's student lowered his number (and made it better).
New Kid, I'm looking for some mention of Gustav's examiners. I figured that paragraph said gracious things about the King. I think the information I'm looking for is cut off on the first page -- the signature remnants above the illegible seal.
Time for bed. (Yawn.)
Oops. So, I'm the humanities person who thinks she knows what the Erdos number is...but forgets the main point. Yes, the student lowered my colleagues Erdos number. Mea culpa!
Anyway, sounds like your student has an illustrious lineage, and future, regardless! Felicitations!
I'm descended from Gauss! (Of course, so are more than 28000 other people...)
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