Carleton Department Genealogy

Visualizing the collective ancestry of Math/Stats, while problematizing the notion of formal academic lineage.

Below are diagrams of the Carleton Math/Stats Department collective genealogy. Data is sourced largely from the Mathematics Genealogy Project. You can interact with the applet by:

• Zoom and Pan: Scroll/pinch to zoom and click/drag to pan.
• Point: Hover and click on nodes to isolate their ancestors and descendants.
• Search: Type a name in the search bar to find specific scholars.
• Switch Layouts: Use the dropdown menu to explore different perspectives on the data.

As you explore, it is worth reflecting upon the structural and historical limitations inherent to the data. The Project maps formal Ph.D. advising lines, which become increasingly fuzzy and anachronistic as we trace further back. The graph collapses many different historical relationships—from medieval master-disciple lineages to nineteenth-century exam coachings—into the same sort of edge. The database also relies on community-driven crowdsourcing, so it contains important gaps and suffers from varying degrees of incompleteness depending on the era and region. For more on this, see the Methodological Notes and Further Reading below.

This applet is a living document and I welcome any corrections or missing details. If you notice omissions, please reach out!

Genealogy Applet

Buoyant Ancestry Kamada–Kawai Sugiyama

Methodological Notes

Data visualization feels authoritative, but we should always question not only the assumptions embedded in the dataset, but also the values and priorities that determined what was collected, classified, and left out. When using the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) to map our department’s lineage, we encounter several thorny and irregularly enforced notions of mentorship.

1. Incompleteness of department data. I started on-campus at Carleton in the Fall of 2021 as a member of the Mathematics and Statistics Department, and only began working on this project in the Spring of 2026. The College was founded in 1866. Our current Department harkens to the old Mathematics and Astronomy Department which, so far as I know, was founded sometime in the mid 1880’s. Based on academic catalogs (thanks, Deanna!) it broke away into an independent Mathematics Department sometime around 1890, then in 1987 it was Mathematics and Computer Science, then Mathematics again in 2006, and lastly Mathematics and Statistics since 2015. While I’ve spent some time chatting on this with senior faculty and browsing the Wayback Machine, it’s still a work in progress—and a huge shoutout to the College archivists for getting me access to tons of historic data! Documentation especially suffers for visiting faculty, many of whom will be missing (especially in the early 21st century).

2. Retrofitting connections. Modern bureaucratic categories (e.g., “Ph.D. Advisor”) do not map well to the correspondences of 17th-century European scholars, let alone 10th-century Islamic polymaths. For example, The MGP relates Gottfried Leibniz to Jacob Bernoulli via Nicolas Malebranche. Leibniz and Bernoulli were correspondents as part of the Republic of Letters, a long-distance community of intellectuals in Europe and the Americas through the 17th and 18th centuries. It is certainly appropriate to think of them as peers and important intellectual influences, but applying the advisor-student lens is problematic!

   The modern Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)—as characterized by original research, a written dissertation, and formal defense—is a recent invention, emerging in early 19th-century Germany.

3. Intellectual lineage vs institutional certification. Uncritically accepting (for a moment) the representation of scholarly traditions as family trees, the curators of MGP do not uniformly apply criteria for an advisee-student relationship across time and space. For example, their choices in ancient networks reflect a prioritization of master-disciple lineages, though they seem to reverse this policy as modern research universities begin to solidify.

   1. Caroline Turnage-Butterbaugh and Owen Biesel have ancestry ending with Walter William Rouse Ball, a mathematician, lawyer, and fellow of Trinity College starting in 1875. At this time, Cambridge did not use a Ph.D. system (their first mathematics Ph.D. was not awarded until 1924), instead relying on the Mathematical Tripos examination. This was a grueling, multi-day affair supported by an intricate culture of private coaches, strenuous physical training, and intense competition that transformed mathematical physics and pedagogical training.

   2. Joseph Johnson’s lineage is entirely disconnected from the main graph. Professor Johnson’s oldest listed relative is the British-born mechanical engineer Lionel Simeon Marks, who studied at the Mason Science College before completing his Master of Engineering degree from Cornell and becoming a professor at Harvard in 1894 (the Engineering School had been founded in 1847). Keep in mind that doctoral degrees were not a baseline criterion for professorships at many colleges well into the 20th century!

   These “dead ends” reflect shifting political economies, in which expanding industries demanding standardized, predictable credentials led to the codification of the Ph.D.

   3. Nearly every member of the department can trace back to Gregory Chioniades (c. 1296) and Shams al-Dīn al-Bukhārī at the Maragheh Observatory in Ilkhanid Persia—men who existed under vastly different traditions of scientific patronage and were part of medieval networks of text transmission. Chioniades, a Byzantine scholar, traveled to Persia to study astronomy and mathematics, translating a number of texts into Greek under Shams al-Dīn al-Bukhārī’s mentorship. Identifying their connection with the modern advisor-student relationship is ahistorical, even if it makes for a fun diagram!

4. Ideological capture. Genealogies like the above mimic patriarchal family trees, privileging a single “father figure” (Doktorvater) and erasing the influences of peers, co-authors, committee members, textbook authors, informal mentors, the friends who support us through hard times, and workers who make scholarly enterprise possible in the first place. Moreover, the intellectual contributions of women and other groups historically barred from formal institutional pathways are often completely ignored in such representations.

   The MGP, relying largely on institutional records tied to Western universities, over-represents European and North American lineages and struggles to capture other modalities of scholarly heritage. Indeed, the Project naturalizes a teleological account of mathematical history, presenting mathematical knowledge as the product of an unbroken lineage of exceptional individuals rather than of collaborative, cumulative, and socially situated practices.

Further Reading

For more on histories of mathematical education, transmission, and professionalization, consider the following:

• Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Theoretical Physics, Andrew Warwick.
• “Lady Wranglers,” Joy Rankin.
• Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, William Clark.
• The Emergence of the American Mathematical Research Community, 1876–1900, Karen H. Parshall and David E. Rowe.
• “Defining a Mathematical Research School: The Case of Algebra at the University of Chicago, 1892–1945,” Karen H. Parshall.
• Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, George Saliba.