My Current Mathematics Genealogy

Here is my current mathematics genealogy.

My current Mathematics Genealogy (with doctoral students only): https://t.co/EAOiY0tasi

My MGP page (24 doctoral students): https://t.co/p35XlLXjoA

Current doctoral students: Abby Hickok, Grace Li, Jerry Luo, Kaiyan Peng, Mina Shahi

Also: I can't wait to have grandstudents! pic.twitter.com/dOU2wviu1V

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) July 16, 2021

PhDTree: Visualizing Academic Genealogies

PhDTree is now visualizing academic family trees like the Mathematical Genealogy Project (MGP) used to. (You can still find textual listings there but it seems like one now has to pay money to order a visual tree.) Also, PhDTree isn't focusing on mathematicians. On the negative side, I have heard people discussing errors that they found in it. So we seem to have the common tradeoff of more comprehensiveness because the information comes from an algorithm rather than manual entry at the cost of more errors as a byproduct. (That said, one can also do subsequent manual edits in PhDTree to fix one's genealogy.)

Here are my PhDTree and MGP listings.

Mentorship Fecundity

A new paper in Nature uses data from the Mathematical Genealogy Project to explore "mentorship fecundity".

Title: The role of mentorship in protege performance

Authors: R. Dean Malmgren, Julio M. Ottino, and Luis A. N. Amaral

Abstract: The role of mentorship on protege performance is a matter of importance to academic, business, and governmental organizations. While the benefits of mentorship for proteges, mentors and their organizations are apparent, the extent to which proteges mimic their mentors' career choices and acquire their mentorship skills is unclear. Here, we investigate one aspect of mentor emulation by studying mentorship fecundity---the number of proteges a mentor trains---with data from the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which tracks the mentorship record of thousands of mathematicians over several centuries. We demonstrate that fecundity among academic mathematicians is correlated with other measures of academic success. We also find that the average fecundity of mentors remains stable over 60 years of recorded mentorship. We further uncover three significant correlations in mentorship fecundity. First, mentors with small mentorship fecundity train proteges that go on to have a 37% larger than expected mentorship fecundity. Second, in the first third of their career, mentors with large fecundity train proteges that go on to have a 29% larger than expected fecundity. Finally, in the last third of their career, mentors with large fecundity train proteges that go on to have a 31% smaller than expected fecundity.


I haven't read the paper, but the results remind me of regression towards the mean. However, the authors have used randomly shuffled networks to try to account for such things, so maybe it really is more than that?

Mathematical Genealogy WebApp

Courtesy Tim Chartier, I just found out about a WebApp that creates a tree with one's mathematical genealogy on the fly. I approve!

Here is my mathematical genealogy.

The not-quite-regular cousin dinner

As some of you probably know, I have cousins. Lots of them, in fact. Among other things, this means that some of my ancestors apparently fucked like bunny rabbits. (OK, that statement's not technically accurate for numerous reasons, but I think it's funny, so it's staying.)

Occasionally, I even see my cousins---like tonight, when we got together for dinner at Island's in West LA. Islands is another of the restaurants I really like that I miss now that I am in the UK, so I was pleased when that was the suggested location. The group of cousins that met today were those on my father's side. This was the third of our "annual" dinners that has taken place during the last roughly 7 years.

On this occasion, only two cousins were missing: Brooke Porter, who is at home in New York at the moment (though we did talk to her briefly on the phone and passed the phone around the table); and Debbie Porter (the eldest), who has been AWOL for O(20) years. I'm pretty sure I actually met Debbie once. As far as I can tell, nobody even knows where or how to find her anymore. The youngest, Andrew Porter, is now in college at University of Arizona. His comment about USC was the best line of the night. ("USC is not a real school. It has a condom as a mascot!") Jeffrey Porter is the brother of Brooke, Andrew, and Debbie. Their father is Jack Porter, the youngest of the three original Porter brothers. (And, yes, they were "original" in some sense, because the family name was changed to Porter upon their entry into the U.S. for reasons for prejudice---that is, to try to avoid it---and pronounceability.)

The middle of the original Porter brothers is Abe, whose hair currently resembles that of Shirley Temple (except for its gray color). His kids are Scott Porter (the second oldest member of the family present tonight) and Leslie Porter.

My father, Samuel, is the oldest of the three original Porter brothers. My brother Adam was today's elder statesman. My sister Tamara (Tammy) was also present.

Among the Porter cousins, Adam, Tammy, Jeffrey, and Leslie live in Los Angeles. Andrew's official home is still here at some level, though he only comes back during college breaks at this point. Note that 7 of us came to dinner, and we used 6 cars to do it. I was the only one sensible enough to mooch a ride.

I'm tempted to make comments about the baldness rank-ordering among the males, but maybe I'll just get ahold of recent pictures at some point and post them.

Now let's see how long it takes for snarky comments to show up...