Benjamin Lerner

Academic Genealogy

In some social circles, it is quite the achievement to be able to cite one's ancestry as far back as the Domesday Book, or through patronymics and clan affiliations, as a way of grounding one's place in society. In academia, our genealogies are slightly less well known, but no less impressive. Here then, is nearly four hundred years of my pedagogical pedigree. Perhaps you, fellow thinker, are a closer relative than you knew.

• Ben Lerner
• Dan Grossman (2003)
• Greg Morrisett (1995)
• Bob Harper (1985)
• Robert Constable (1968)
• Stephen Kleene (1934)
• Alonzo Church (1927)
• Oswald Veblen (1903)
• Eliakim Hastings Moore (1885)
• Hubert Anson Newton (1850)
• Michel Chasles (1814)
• Simeon Denis Poisson (unknown)
• Joseph Lagrange (none)
• Leonhard Euler (1726)
• Johann Bernoulli (1694)
• Jacob Bernoulli (unknown)
• Gottfried Leibniz (1666)
• Erhard Weigel (1650)

There is an alternative history for a middle portion of this list: Greg Morrisett was co-advised by Jeannette Wing:

• Jeannette Wing (1983)
• Jon Guttag (1975)
• Jim Horning (1969)
• Jerry Feldman (1966)
• Alan Perlis (1950)
• Philip Franklin (1921)

Franklin, in turn, was another student of Oswald Veblen.

Information is collated from the Software Engineering Academic Genealogy and the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

Erdös Number

The Erdös number is defined as the number of published, technical papers necessary to connect oneself to Paul Erdös by some path of co-authorship. Currently, my Erdös number is at most 5:

• Ben Lerner to Dan Grossman
  (via "Searching for Type-Error Messages", PLDI 2007)
• Dan Grossman to David Notkin
  (via "Automatically Inferring Structural Changes for Matching Across Program Versions", ICSE 2007)
• David Notkin to Paul Beame
  (via "Model Checking Large Software Specifications", FSE 1996)
• Paul Beame to Michael Molloy
  (via "A Sharp Threshold in Proof Complexity", STOC 2001)
• Michael Molloy to Paul Erdös
  (via "On a Ramsey-type Problem", Journal of Graph Theory, 2002)