My Physics and Math Heritage

This is just a “personal life update” kind of post, but I recently found out a couple of cool things about my academic history that I thought were neat enough to write down so that I don’t forget them.

Oppenheimer

When the Christopher Nolan Biopic about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer was about to come out, it was billed as an “Avengers of Physics”, where every major physicist working in the US early and middle 20th century would be featured. I had a thought tracing my “academic family tree” to see if my PhD advisor’s advisor’s advisor’s advisor’s was involved in any of the major physics projects depicted in the movie, to see if I could spot them portrayed in the movie as a nice personal connection.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, the relationship between a PhD candidate and their doctoral advisor is a very personal and individual one: they personally direct and guide the candidate’s research and thesis. To an extent, they are like an academic parent.

I was able to find my academic family tree and, to my surprise, my academic lineage actually traces directly back to a key figure in the movie!

• My advisor, Hesham El-Askary, received his PhD under the advisory of Menas Kafatos at George Mason university
• Dr. Kafatos received his PhD under the advisory of Philip Morrison at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Dr. Morrison received his PhD in 1940 at University of California, Berkeley under the advisory of none other than J. Robert Oppenheimer himself!

So, I started this out on a quest to figure out if I was “academically descended” from anyone in the movie, and I ended up finding out I was Oppenheimer’s advisee’s advisee’s advisee’s advisee! I ended up being able to watch the movie and identify my great-great-grand advisor no problem, and I think even my great-grand advisor. A fun little unexpected surprise and a cool personal connection to a movie that I enjoyed a lot.

Erdos

As an employee at Google, you can customize your directory page with “badges”, which are little personalized accomplishments or achievements, usually unrelated to any actual work you do. I noticed that some people had an “Erdos Number N” badge (1, 2, 3, etc.). I had never given any thought into my own personal Erdos number (it was probably really high, in my mind) but I thought maybe I could look into it in order to get a shiny worthless badge.

In academia, Paul Erdos is someone who wrote so many papers and collaborated with so many people that it became a joking “non-accomplishment” to say that you wrote a paper with him. Then after a while it became an joking non-accomplishment to say that you wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with him (because, who hasn’t?). And then it became an even more joking more non-accomplishment to say you had an Erdos Number of 3 (you wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with Dr. Erdos).

Anyway I just wanted to get that badge so I tried to figure it out. It turns my most direct trace through:

1. I co-authored “Application of recurrent neural networks for drought projections in California” with Daniele C. Struppa.
2. Dr. Struppa co-authored “Applications of commutative and computational algebra to partial differential equations” with William W. Adams.
3. Dr. Adams co-authored “Non-Archimedian analytic functions taking the same values at the same points” with Ernst G. Straus.
4. Dr. Straus collaborated with many people, including Einstein, Graham, Goldberg, and 20 papers with Erdos.

So I guess my Erdos number is 4? The median number for mathematicians today seems to be 5, so it’s just one step above that. Not really a note-worthy accomplishment, but still neat enough that I want a place to put the work tracking this down the next time I am curious again.

Anyways I submitted the information above and they gave me that sweet Edros 4 badge! It was nice to have for about a month before quitting the company.

That’s It

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a nice rest of your day!