Each academic ancestor glows at the city where they earned their doctorate, from birth to death. Where many ancestors overlap in time and place, the glow intensifies into a hot spot. Move the slider (or press Play) to watch the centre of gravity drift from the medieval east into early-modern Germany and Italy and, finally, toward the present. The same data drives the genealogy tree and the collaborator map.
Basemap from Natural Earth (public domain), via world-atlas. Historical political borders from the historical-basemaps project by A. Ourednik, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Boundaries are benchmark-year approximations, shown for illustration only.