Dave Green’s PhD/research antecedents (and Erdős number)

Antecedents

Here is a list of my PhD supervisor, their PhD supervisor... their academic ‘advisor’ (in the days before PhDs)... etc.

• My supervisor: Stephen F. Gull;
• their supervisor: Malcolm S. Longair;
• their supervisor: Martin Ryle;
• their supervisor: John A. Ratcliffe;
• their advisor: Edward V. Appleton;
• their advisor: Ernest Rutherford;
• their advisor: Joseph J. Thomson;
• their advisor: John W. Strutt (3rd Baron Rayleigh);
• their advisor: Edward J. Routh;
• their advisor: William Hopkins;
• their advisor: Adam Sedgwick;
• their advisor: Thomas Jones;
• their advisor: Thomas Postlethwaite;
• their advisor: Stephen Whisson;
• their advisor: Walter Taylor;
• their advisor: Robert Smith;
• their advisor: Roger Cotes;
• their advisor: Isaac Newton.

Note that the latter (‘advisor’) links are due to Wikipedia, so trust them as much as you want to. But these are also reported by the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP). Also there are some additional branches, not shown above, due to multiple ‘advisors’.

In the MGP you can take things back even further. From Isaac Newton to:

• their advisor: Isaac Barrow;
• their advisor: Vincenzo Viviani;
• their advisor: Galileo Galilei;
• their advisor: Ostilio Ricci;
• their advisor: Nicolò Tartaglia.

For those names in bold above, see here.

Update: in addition, a different route, via Ernest Rutherford then Alexander Bickerton leads much futher back. It goes via Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm al-Khayyām al-Nīsābūrī – commonly known as Omar Khayyam – and via Abu ʿAli al-Husayn (Avicenna) ibn Sina all the way back to Abu Abdallah Al-Husayn ibn Ibrahim al-Natili, Abu Sahl 'Isa ibn Yahya al-Masihi and Abu Mansur al-Hasan ibn Nuh al-Qumri.

See this .pdf for the route, which also includes the route above, including some of the additional ‘advisor’ branches.

Erdős number

My Erdős number is 5 (because, according to the American Mathematical Society’s webform, my PhD supervisor – who I have co-authored many papers with – has an Erdős number of 4). I don’t have a Bacon number.

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