The Genealogy Toolkit
extracts the scientific genealogy of a given mathematician
This is tool that builds the graph of mathematician
genealogy based on the PhD student/advisor
relationship.
For example, my genealogy is here.
Download the toolkit here.
Readme:
Version 0.2 August 2010
The genealogy toolkit recursively builts the DAG of
advisors of mathematicians
using the http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu
website
It is distributed under the CeCILL Licence.
It requires:
- perl with LWP to browse and parse the website
- dot to generate the output file
(http://www.graphviz.org/)
How to proceed:
1) Go to http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu website
2) Enter the name of a mathematician (example: Hilbert)
3) In the URL you have the ID of the corresponding
mathematician
Example, for Hibert the URL is
http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=7298
meaning that Hibert's ID is 7298
4) Generate the dot file
- extract_web.pl: browse the website (the runtime can be
pretty long as there can be a lot of ancestors)
- extract_web_all.pl: Same as above but also construct the
tree downwards (with the students).
- generate_dot.pl: build the dot file
You can pipe them:
extract_web.pl 7298|generate_dot.pl> hilbert.dot
or
extract_web.pl 7298 > hibert.txt;generate_dot
hilbert.dot
New: Don Fike has provided me with an enhanced version that
gets the student of the given mathematician and build the
tree towards its decedent. The script is called
extract_web_all.pl and works the same way as extract_web.pl
5) Process the dot file and generate the graph output
Example for a pdf output:
dot hilbert.dot -Tpdf -Gcharset=latin1 -o hilbert.pdf
If you have any questions, please contact me.

