Academic genealogy
August 19, 2026
My advisor, Petros Koumoutsakos, was looking at his academic genealogy a few years ago. Some websites like mathgenealogy.org have already collected the profiles of a large number of scientists and their advisors. I thought I would try to produce a visualization of it and, along the way, learn about my academic ancestors. Here is what I found:
The furthest ancestor I could find, Nikolaus Poda von Neuhaus, was a Jesuit priest best known for his study of insects. After that, the lineage contains remarkable names. The one I immediately noticed was Ludwig Boltzmann, the father of statistical mechanics and associated with the famous constant . I was impressed to also see George Uhlenbeck in my direct lineage. He and Samuel Goudsmit obtained their PhDs the same year under the same advisor, Paul Ehrenfest, and are best known for proposing the electron spin.
I have also included "siblings" in the genealogy. Again, many famous scientists appear.
Any fluid dynamicist would recognize Mach, who studied supersonic flows and shock waves, giving his name to the dimensionless ratio of characteristic velocity to the speed of sound; Burgers, giving his name to the famous nonlinear advection-diffusion equation; Spalart, who developed the Spalart-Allmaras one-equation turbulence model, widely used for aerospace CFD.
We can also see many big names in physics and chemistry. Lise Meitner, who gave the first physical explanation of nuclear fission; Walther Nernst, who formulated the third law of thermodynamics; Johann Loschmidt, who gave a first realistic estimate of the size of molecules; Marian Smoluchowski, who derived a kinetic theory of Brownian motion independently of Einstein; Hendrik Kramers, who made important contributions to quantum mechanics and statistical physics; Hendrik Casimir, who discovered the Casimir effect in quantum mechanics.
I could keep going a lot longer. Now I know what "impostor syndrome" means.
I was then curious to see the projection of this genealogy onto the world map:
From 1760 to 1817, my academic ancestors were Jesuits and mathematicians studying insects and computing logarithm tables for artillery in Graz and Ljubljana. They then settled in Vienna, where thermal physics became the major focus for a century. Ehrenfest then moved to Leiden, where Uhlenbeck obtained his PhD. Uhlenbeck then crossed the Atlantic to Michigan; his student there, Konopinski, later participated in the Manhattan Project: the physics became nuclear. Later, with Ferziger and Leonard, research turned to fluid mechanics. Petros Koumoutsakos, my advisor, chose ETH Zürich and came back to Europe. This is where I worked on my PhD. He then moved to Harvard, just 6 months before I defended, and I followed him there as a postdoc. I'm hoping to keep this lineage going for more generations, and I wish I knew what it would look like in a century.
I retrieved this data and made the visualizations with the help of Claude Code (Fable 5). The mathgenealogy.org website contains almost all of the data shown here. For the more recent years, I had to get the list of academic siblings from my advisor's CV and, for his advisor, from the Caltech thesis archive. I don't know how many are missing in earlier generations.