Academic Tree

Every advisor has an advisor. Follow the chain of PhD supervisors far enough back and it turns into a walk through the history of mathematics, physics, and computer science. Here's mine — coded up as an actual tree, not just a screenshot.

A few fun facts about the family

• Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi — one of the first mathematicians to run research seminars the way we still do today, and the first Jewish mathematician to hold a full professorship at a German university. He also liked to say "man muss immer umkehren" — "one must always invert."
• Otto Hesse — the Hessian matrix, a staple of every optimization and deep-learning course, is named after him. He studied in the same Königsberg circle that trained physicist Gustav Kirchhoff.
• Friedrich Julius Richelot — constructed a regular 257-sided polygon with just a ruler and compass. The proof ran nearly 200 pages.
• Carl Gottfried Neumann — the Neumann boundary condition, used constantly in PDEs, heat equations, and physics simulation, carries his name. His father, Franz Ernst Neumann, was a founding figure of mathematical physics.
• William Edward Story — helped build one of the first graduate research programs in mathematics in the United States, at Clark University in 1889.
• Solomon Lefschetz — lost both hands in an industrial accident while working as an electrical engineer, then switched fields entirely and became one of the 20th century's most influential topologists.
• John McCarthy — coined the term "Artificial Intelligence," invented the Lisp programming language, and won the Turing Award in 1971.
• Ruzena Bajcsy — pioneered "active perception" in robotics and founded the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the first robotics labs in the US.
• Jana Kosecka — co-authored An Invitation to 3-D Vision, a standard reference in computer vision, and now advises me at George Mason.