The advent of the Information Age has made it much easier to track one’s family history, turning days spent poring over dusty vital records into a few hours online.
The same can be said of tracing one’s academic history.
The Mathematics Genealogy Project at North Dakota State University compiles an online database of mathematicians with doctoral degrees in a wide range of associated disciplines and allows users to trace a lineage by doctoral advisor.
The database led a student to trace Dr. Michael B. Steer‘s doctoral forebears back nearly five centuries. Steer, Lampe Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has some remarkable ancestors – including Galileo Galilei, as the illustration (excerpt from magazine, PDF) shows.
A doctoral graduate of the University of Queensland in 1983 under the advisement of Dr. Peter Khan, Steer shares an ancestor with Dr. Paul Franzon, Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a doctoral graduate of the University of Adelaide.
Source: Fall/Winter 2015 NC State College of Engineering magazine.