Thursday, November 30, 2006

My wikipedia lineage

I just found yet another of my advisors/mentors on wikipedia, so I've got quite the lineage going. (Hopefully I can make them proud.) Thus far, my mentors with wikipedia pages include the following people:


Leonid Bunimovich, my official postdoc advisor at Georgia Tech (math department)

Predrag Cvitanovic, my unofficial postdoc advisor at Georgia Tech (physics department)

Michael Lacey, the PI of the VIGRE grant in Georgia Tech's math department (he wrote my recommendation letters that addressed teaching)

Richard Liboff, my Ph.D. advisor at Cornell

Jerry Marsden, my first SURF advisor at Caltech (and author of numerous recommendation letters for me back in the day)

Steve Strogatz, a member of my Ph.D. committee (representing my minor in Theoretical & Applied Mechanics)


Mentioned as a famous alum of the University of Cambridge's Theory of Condensed Matter group is Mike Cross, my postdoc advisor at Caltech. (His being mentioned in this manner suggests he probably will get his own page eventually.)

Lots of wikipedia pages also refer to John Guckenheimer (a member of my Ph.D. committee, representing my minor in Math), who is also likely to have his own page eventually. (I'm not sure if my final committee member, Greg Ezra, will end up with a wikipedia page.)

Gerald Whitham, my original faculty advisor at Caltech, probably deserves a page.

If one wants to generalize and consider mathematical genealogy, my grand-advisor Harold Grad (one of the fathers of kinetic theory) doesn't have a page but deserves one, his advisor was Richard Courant, and at that point one just keeps finding ultra-famous people as one looks at the advising history.

By the way, have I mentioned that mathematicians tend to be obsessed with academic genealogy? And that many of us have OCD?

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