My academic pedigree

From the mathematics geneology project, I have learned that my PhD supervisory "genealogy" can be traced from me to Hermann Bondi ("great grandfather"), one of the originators of the Steady State Cosmology theory, and Arthur Eddington another great astronomer. Hermann Bondi was an astronomer who was the son of a medical doctor. He also liked to explore more than one discipline. This parallel with my life experience might be thought of as the result of memes, which I mention only because one of my favorite authors on matters of consciousness, Susan Blackmore, writes about them. A richer concept (in my unauthoritative opinion) along those lines would be that of common archetypes, or sychronicity, as introduced by my favorite psychatrist, Carl Jung. Back to the geneology, the mathematics geneology project dead ends for me at Arthur Eddington but a biography indicates that E T Whittaker, A N Whitehead and E W Barnes could be considered as Eddington's advisors. Whitehead's geneology can be traced back to Issac Newton (inventor of calculus..).

Every mathematician has an Erdos Number. Mine is 5 because a wrote a paper with Bob Cox. Oakland U has put up a pile of stuff on the Erdos number.

This is all in the past. Looking to the future, my really serious work in astronomy may one day be tracked back to my 2006 visit to MSSL where I began work with Kinwah Wu. Kinwah's mathematical genealogy can be traced way back to the 14th century (try it!) passing the likes of John Wheeler (invented the phrase 'black hole'), Jean-Baptiste Fourier, Gustav Dirichlet, Joseph Lagrange, Leonhard Euler, Gottfried Leibniz (inventor of calculus..), cool!

Math Heros (not complete..)