Here's what I have found out about my academic ancestors. This is the chain of teachers running backwards from my own 2015 thesis. The roots are wider than a single doctoral line: alongside my Ph.D. advisors it also takes in my M.Sc. and postdoctoral advisors, and the lines of each branch rejoin the great traditions further upstream. Follow any branch outward and you travel through time, out of the quantum-information era and into the great German mathematical tradition of Hilbert, Gauss, Dirichlet, Felix Klein and Lichtenberg (who taught Alexander von Humboldt at Göttingen, the namesake of the Humboldt Fellowship I later held); sideways, on the Spanish branch, into the world of Santiago Ramón y Cajal; on the Polish branch through Rubinowicz, into the 19th-century founders of modern theoretical physics: Hertz, Helmholtz and Sommerfeld; through the Enlightenment with Euler, Laplace, Fourier, Lagrange and Poisson; into the Scientific Revolution of Leibniz, Huygens and Mersenne; and on into the Italian Renaissance, where the line runs through Luca Pacioli, who taught mathematics to Leonardo da Vinci. Keep going and it threads through medieval Paris with Nicole Oresme, brushes past Copernicus, and is carried out of the Greek-speaking world by Byzantine scholars (Plethon, Bessarion, Bryennios) to its deepest roots in the Islamic Golden Age: Kamāl al-Dīn Ibn Yūnus, Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (who in the 12th century worked out when a cubic equation has a positive solution, centuries before algebra had the notation to express it), the mathematician-poet Omar Khayyām, and, thirty-seven generations back, the polymath Avicenna.
How the graph is built. It's a graph rather than a strict tree, a DAG really, since some ancestors are reached by more than one path. The data comes from the Mathematics Genealogy Project, supplemented with my own M.Sc. and Ph.D. supervisors and the group leaders whose groups I joined. Repeated ancestors are trimmed: each path ends either at a node marked Unknown or at a name shown elsewhere. Those carry a double ring; click to jump to where the person actually branches. Distance from the centre is time (the dashed rings are dated), and the colour wash behind each region marks the country where that doctorate was awarded.
JT sits at the centre; each ring outward is one generation further back. Drag the canvas to pan, scroll to zoom. Click any name to expand or collapse its ancestors, or drag a name to nudge it sideways (its radius stays pinned by year of doctorate). Use the −/+ buttons to step the visible depth one generation at a time. Hover for a node summary. Search a mathematician to highlight every path to them in red; click a country in the legend or drag the year slider to fade everyone else.
The phrase “doctoral advisor” doesn’t mean the same thing in 12th-century Persia, 16th-century Padua, or 20th-century Berlin. This graph stretches across eras when the institutional concept of a thesis director either didn’t exist or existed in a very different shape, so the edges aren’t all the same kind of relationship.
Across countries and eras:
What the line style encodes:
For any non-trivial edge, hover the child node to see the specific link note explaining what evidence supports that relationship and what its character is. The deeper one goes in time, the more these links should be read as scholarly lineage rather than as the bureaucratic fact of a 21st-century PhD defense.
The chain ends at three Persian polymaths who taught Avicenna around the year 1000: al-Natili (logic), al-Masihi (medicine in Baghdad), and al-Qumri (medicine in Bukhara). Their own teachers aren’t named in any source, so the genealogy data model runs out there. But the broader thread that brought them their intellectual material is concretely traceable through a sequence of named people over a thousand years. Two interwoven strands carry it.
The philosophical strand (al-Natili line). Plato founds the Academy in Athens in 387 BCE; his student Aristotle spends twenty years there. By late antiquity the Academy has become a Neoplatonist school. Plotinus (around 205-270 CE) heads it; his student Porphyry edits the master’s work and writes the Isagoge, a beginner’s introduction to Aristotelian logic that turns out to have an extraordinary career. (We’ll meet it again in 750 years.)
The chain runs forward through Iamblichus → Proclus → Damascius, who heads the Academy by the early 6th century. In 529 CE, Justinian I closes Plato’s Academy by edict. Damascius and six other philosophers, including the great Aristotelian commentator Simplicius, flee east to the court of the Sasanian king Khosrow I in Ctesiphon. They return after a peace treaty in 532, but Khosrow is now a patron of Greek learning. Meanwhile in Alexandria, Ammonius Hermiae (around 440-520) is simultaneously teaching Damascius, Simplicius, John Philoponus and Olympiodorus the Younger, who keep the Alexandrian school running as the Athenian center collapses.
In the Christian Syriac world, Sergius of Reshaina (d. 536) translates Aristotle and Galen into Syriac at the School of Nisibis. In 9th-century Baghdad, Abu Bishr Matta ibn Yunus (d. 940), a Christian Aristotelian, becomes the leading logician of his city. His student al-Farabi (the “second teacher”, after Aristotle) builds the synthesis that defines Arabic Aristotelianism, and his student in turn, Yahya ibn Adi, keeps the Christian-Aristotelian school in Baghdad alive through the late 10th century. This is the tradition that al-Natili draws from when, in Avicenna’s father’s house in Bukhara, he opens Porphyry’s Isagoge and starts teaching the young Ibn Sina. The same 270-CE text. Boethius will translate it into Latin around 510 CE; medieval European universities will still be teaching from it in the 1300s.
The medical strand (al-Masihi / al-Qumri line). Hippocrates (5th c. BCE) and his late interpreter Galen (129 to around 216 CE) define the Greek medical canon. Galen alone wrote some 600 works. The corpus is translated into Syriac by Sergius of Reshaina in the 6th century. After the Christian School of Edessa is closed in 489, its scholars resettle east and contribute to the Academy of Gondishapur in southwestern Persia, which under Khosrow I becomes the leading hospital of late antiquity, mixing Greek, Syriac, Persian, and Indian medicine.
In 765 CE, the Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur summons Jurjis ibn Bukhtishu, head of Gondishapur, to Baghdad to treat him. Jurjis stays. His family will dominate Baghdad medicine for the next 250 years: Jurjis → Bukhtishu II → Jibril ibn Bukhtishu (d. 827). Jibril’s student Yuhanna ibn Masawayh (777-857) becomes the leading physician of his generation, and in turn teaches Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809-873). At the House of Wisdom under caliph al-Ma’mun, Hunayn translates over a hundred Galenic works (plus Aristotle, Plato, and much else) from Greek and Syriac into Arabic.
These translations become the standard medical curriculum. al-Masihi, a Christian boy from northern Iran, walks into Baghdad in the late 10th century and learns medicine directly from Hunayn’s corpus. He’ll move on to the Khwarazm court and there teach Avicenna. The medical Bukhara circle that al-Qumri belongs to absorbs the same translated Galen plus the clinical innovations of al-Razi (Rhazes), whose works al-Qumri cites extensively. The two strands of medicine and philosophy converge in the young Avicenna, who synthesizes the entire received tradition in his Canon of Medicine and Kitāb al-Shifā’.
The pure teacher-student chain. Not the whole thousand-year arc, but the documented links above where a specific master and pupil overlapped in person, with approximate dates for the apprenticeship.
The gaps in this list (Aristotle to Plotinus, Hunayn ibn Ishaq to al-Masihi, and so on) are where the chain becomes text-mediated rather than personal: someone reads a book by someone five generations dead. Both kinds of transmission matter, but only the in-person pairs here fit the “X taught Y” model of this genealogy.
What the genealogy graph cannot show. This isn’t a clean teacher-student chain. It’s a thousand years of textbooks, translation projects, and migrating schools surviving political upheavals (Justinian’s 529 edict, the Arab conquest, the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258) precisely because they crossed civilizational boundaries. When the Athenian school closed, the books moved to Persia; when Persia fell, they moved to Iraq; when Iraq’s House of Wisdom was sacked, much had already moved to al-Andalus and from there into Latin Europe via the Toledo School of Translators. The “Unknown” stubs above the three Avicenna teachers aren’t blank. They stand for everyone from Plato to Hunayn ibn Ishaq whose intellectual descent is visible without fitting the teacher-student data model.