Thursday, September 19, 2013


Yesterday's Challenge:  

Who is my (meaning me, Dan Russell's) great-great-great-great-great-great-great advisor?   (And why is that an incredibly cool thing to know?) 
That is, who was my advisor's-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor was (back 7 PhD generations).

Answer:  Simeon Denis Poisson (one of the greatest mathematicians of the early 19th century).  

Simeon Denis Poissonmy advisor's-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor
(
Image from Wikimedia)

How to find out:  Well, by now you know who my advisor is--Jerome Feldman.  (He was my advisor at the University of Rochester, although he is now at UC Berkeley.)  He's been the advisor for a LOT of students.  (As someone pointed out, I work with 4 other Feldman students at Google.)  

But probably the simplest way to figure out my great (* 7) advisor is to use The Mathematics Genealogy Project advisor tool.  If you start with my name and work backwards - Daniel Russell  - you'll find that I'm a descendent of S. D. Poisson.  

And the simplest way to discover the Genealogy Project advisor tool is to search for my name and the title of my thesis.  Like this: 

     [ Daniel Martin Russell "Schema based problem solving" ] 

The Genealogy Project tool shows up pretty high in that list. As several readers pointed out, once you do the search and notice that there's a tool labeled "genealogy," the rest is simple.  

Why use my full name in the search?  

Lesson 1: Because different kinds of sites use different conventions for naming individuals. For genealogies, typically you want to use the full name.  (But be careful; you still might have to hunt around on name variations.  Geoffry vs. Jeffry vs. Jeffery, etc.)  I used my full name here because I know that this is the convention for official documents (and the PhD degrees are very, very formalized).  

And then, you just work backwards from me: 
Daniel Martin Russell (1985)  
Jerome Arthur Feldman (1964)  - advisor 
Alan Jay Perlis (1950) - grandadvisor *1 
Phillip Franklin (1921) - * 2 
Oswald Veblen (1903) - * 3 
E. H. (Eliakim Hastings) Moore (1885) - * 4 
H. A. (Hubert Anson) Newton (1850) - * 5 
Michel Chasles (1814) - * 6 
Simeon Denis Poisson (1800) - * 7  
And of course Poisson's advisors were the even more famous mathematicians / physicists Joseph Louis Lagrange (1754) and Pierre-Simon Laplace (~1760).  

Still, I like Poisson as one of my great-advisors because his Poisson distribution is used so often in statistics and computer science. (1)   When I first learned about a Poisson distribution and figured out how it works, I felt... empowered.  It sounds silly, I know, but for the first time in my undergraduate career, I felt as though I'd learned something that I would never have figured out on my own.  It was my first moment of mathematical awe and surprise. 

I never imagined that I was intellectually related to the man himself.  That was a second great surprise.  

But perhaps the best / coolest thing is that his name is one of 72 French geniuses inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.  (As both Sarah and Ramón pointed out.)  

Lesson 2: Be sure to look for a tool that can do the computation for you.  Sometimes (especially for repeated information links, like we see in this kind of a problem), you'll find a tool that will do the heavy lifting for you.  


More on parrotfish tomorrow. 

Search on! 


_____ 
(1) Background: In the context of queueing theory the Poisson distribution is a pretty good model for how items arrive into a queue that needs to be managed.  Queues are pretty fundamental to the way all computers work, so everyone in CS needs to learn this at one point or another. 

4 comments:

  1. Hello Dr. Russell, congratulations for your advisors. It is true that your great-great-great-great-great-great-great advisor made incredible things for humanity and each of one of your advisors have changed the world.

    Looking the The Mathematics Genealogy Project, do you have students that you give advice in thesis?

    Finally, at least for me, you are a great advisor not in thesis project...in life; because your teaching have helped me among other things to: know more about world, to discover and learn new incredible information, see places of the world and give a better use and shape to my brain; for that, I will be eternally grateful.

    Thanks Dr. Russell!!!

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    Replies
    1. Good question. Although I've been on several PhD thesis committees, I am not the "advisor of record" for any of my students. You have to be at a university to have that position. So while I've thought about doing this before, I've never actually been the main advisor for any student. (Although, gratifyingly, several students have taken earlier versions of my work and advanced it, which is a blessing for any author!)

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  2. Dan

    I am puzzled by your answer. This was The Challenge:

    Challenge:
    Who is my (meaning me, Dan Russell's) great-great-great-great-great-great-great advisor?

    You added after this: In other words, I believe that you can figure out who my advisor's-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor was (back 7 PhD generation

    But the addendum is not the same thing as The Challenge. It is one generation short of The Challenge.

    As you point out in the answer Feldman's advisor is your Grand NOT Great advisor. So, according to The Challenge the Greats would start Prior to the Grand. Seven generations back then gets you to LaPlace and LaGrange.

    N'est pa ?

    Jon

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  3. to use an old Yale expression; I screwed the pooch on this one…
    Candied Yam Jackson
    that aside, in reviewing my missteps, I ran across another source that may be of interest regarding your Great Grand French Poobah linage - Simeon Denis Poisson and a graphical explanation of a Poisson distribution (which did NOTHING to elucidate it for me…):
    Poisson/Wolfram
    Poisson Distribution
    here are the entries for the bracketing grand advisors…
    Lagrange
    Chasles

    fwiw, noticed Chasles's middle name was Floréal and thought that would make a great name for a rapper… then noticed your comment:
    " When I first learned about a Poisson distribution and figured out how it works, I felt... empowered. It sounds silly, I know, but for the first time in my undergraduate career, I felt as though I'd learned something that I would never have figured out on my own. It was my first moment of mathematical awe and surprise."
    which led me to another 'Flo' guy who shot some of this in Paris and it all seemed to be a circle of life/genealogical tree moment… and he thinks he's Bill Gates (at least in that moment) — anyhoo, it gave me a good feelin' as I bid adieu.
    Dr. Flo Rida
    ⌘f for Bill Gates

    fwiw2: watched the entire Stanford Sensemaking III video and thought it was very worthwhile… will probably view again. enjoyed getting a cursory peek at the behind the scenes methodology of searchresearch @ Google and it was good to get a little historical context on how search is evolving. Glad it wasn't tl;dw worthy ;^)

    ReplyDelete