Yuriy Brun's Genealogy

The world of academia is one of the last professions that follows the master-apprentice relationship to indoctrinate new members. In order to become a doctor of philosophy, a crucial step in the quest to become a professor and a researcher, each student is closely and personally advised by his or her mentor. That mentor, often referred to as one's academic "father" or "mother," is responsible for shaping young minds into those of diligent, honest, and ethical scientists. Below is the genealogy of my upbringing, in chronological order, tracing back to the mid 17th century, and including the founders of calculus, basic mathematical theory, and computer science.

• Erhard Weigel (who received his Ph.D. in 1650) spent much of his life popularizing science to make it more accessible to the public, and now has the Weigel crater on the moon named after him.
• His student, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1666), invented calculus, discovered the binary system and the foundation of virtually all modern computer architectures.
• Gottfried's student, Jacob Bernoulli (1684), was the first to develop the technique for solving separable differential equations and introduced the law of large numbers.
• His brother and student, Johann Bernoulli (1694), supported Descartes’ vortex theory over Newton’s theory of gravitation, which ultimately delayed acceptance of Newton’s theory in Europe. Perhaps in a display of karma, Johann lost the naming rights to the L'Hôpital's rule, despite inventing it.
• While young, Johann educated Leonhard Euler (1726), the preeminent mathematician of the 18th century, who introduced much of modern terminology and notation to mathematics, particularly analysis, including the notion of a mathematical function. He has been featured on Swiss bank notes and numerous postage stamps has had asteroid named after him.
• Euler advised Joseph Louis Lagrange, who is most famous for inventing the Lagrange multipliers for finding the extrema of functions taking into account possible constraints.
• One of his three students, Simeon Denis Poisson (1802) is best known for the Poisson's equation, a generalization of Laplace's equation, and also for the Poisson distribution.
• Simeon taught Michel Chasles (1814), who established several important theorems (all called Chasles' theorems), one of which, on solid body kinematics, was seminal for understanding solid bodies' motions and to the development of the theories of dynamics of rigid bodies.
• Michel's student, Hubert Anson Newton (1850), was a worldwide authority on the subjects of meteors and comets, and educated Eliakim Hastings Moore.
• Eliakim Hastings Moore (1885) proved that every finite field is a Galois field, reformulated Hilbert's axioms for geometry so that points were the only primitive notion, and showed that one of Hilbert's axioms for geometry was redundant.
• One of Eliakim's students, Oswald Veblen (1903), was involved with the project that produced the pioneering ENIAC electronic digital computer.
• His student, Alonzo Church (1927), was the author of λ-calculus and the hypothesis, known as Church's Thesis, that every effectively calculable function (effectively decidable predicate) is general recursive. Together with Turing's thesis, Church's thesis forms the foundation of computer science as we know it.
• His student, John Barkley Rosser (1934), showed that the original λ-calculus was inconsistent.
• John's student, Gerald Enoch Sacks (1961), and, in turn, his student, James Claggett Owings, Jr. (1966), worked on recursion theory.
• James' student, Leon J. Osterweil (1971), works in the field of software engineering, concentrating on software analysis and testing.
• Leon's student, Richard N. Taylor (1980), founded the Department of Informatics at the University of California Irvine, is the director of the Institute for Software Research, and works on software design and architectures, especially event-based and peer-to-peer systems.
• Richard's student, and my advisor, Nenad Medvidović (1999), is the director of the USC Center for Systems and Software Engineering and his work focuses on architecture-based software development.
• I, Yuriy Brun (2008), one of Nenad's students, am working on bringing the notions of robustness, security, and scalability that exist in nature's systems into computer science to help us build more complex systems than we ever could before.