Mathematics Genealogy Grapher

What is it?

The Mathematics Genealogy Grapher (Geneagrapher) is a tool to build graphs of mathematical genealogies. Geneagrapher gets data using information from the Mathematics Genealogy Project by starting at specified nodes and then crawling through the ancestor or descendent connections from mathematician to mathematician. The result is a “dot” file that contains each of the mathematicians as nodes with the edges between them indicating advisor-advisee connections.

Geneagrapher code and usage information lives here.

History

• The original version of the Geneagrapher was deployed in October 2006 and was a web-based service where users entered information about the graph they wanted to construct. It was available at my old site until its deletion sometime in August 2009. It was only able to produce ancestor trees.
• Version 0.2 was released on October 6, 2008 as a Python package that a user runs from his or her workstation. This version is able to produce ancestor and descendant trees, and since it runs from the user’s machine, there is no software-imposed limit on the number of starting nodes. Try not to abuse the power.
• Version 0.2-r1 was released on October 7, 2008 and was a maintenance release related to installation activities on Python 2.6.
• Version 0.2.1 was released on September 1, 2009. This version fixed a parsing bug that caused only one advisor to be extracted from pages with multiple advisors. This bug was created due to minor changes in the Mathematics Genealogy Project pages.
• Version 0.2.1-r1 was released on November 3, 2010. This was a maintenance release fixing tests that broke sometime after the release of version 0.2.1.
• Version 0.2.1-r2 was released on August 11, 2011. This was a maintenance release fixing a test broken by updates to the genealogy data.