I was inspired by Bob Carpenter’s Academic Lineage page, who used the Mathematic Genealogy Project to trace the sequence of his PhD supervisors to their supervisors to their supervisors…

Here is mine, which includes Poisson, Gauss and Euler, and ultimately Leibniz.

My PhD was in Computational Linguistics under the supervision of Alexander Narin’yani (I obtained it in 1997 from Moscow Lomonosov University).

  1. Alexander Narin’yani (1972)

  2. Andrei Ershov (1961)

  3. Aleksei Lyapunov (1939)

  4. Nikolai Luzin (1915)

  5. Dimitri Egorov (1901)

  6. Nicolai Bugaev (1866)

  7. Joseph Liouville (1836) Ernst Kummer (1831)
  8. Simeon Poisson (1800) Heinrich Scherk (1823)
  9. Joseph Lagrange (1754) Friedrich Bessel (1810)
  10. Leonhard Euler (1726) Carl Friedrich Gauß (1799)

  11. Johann Bernoulli (1690)

  12. Jacob Bernoulli (1684)

  13. Nicolas Malebranche (1672)

  14. Gottfried Leibniz (1666)

Bugaev studied in Berlin and Paris, hence the split in his lineage. This is what brings both Poisson and Gauss into my line of ur-supervisors, which is very pleasing given my research interests in language and statistics.