The genealogy toolkit

The Genealogy Toolkit extracts the scientific genealogy of a given mathematician.

This is a 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 0.3, August 2020.

The genealogy toolkit recursively builds the DAG of advisors of mathematicians using the 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 (graphviz.org).

How to proceed:

1. Go to the 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 Hilbert the URL is http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=7298, meaning Hilbert'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 constructs 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 > hilbert.txt; generate_dot hilbert.dot
   

   New: Don Fike provided me with an enhanced version that gets the students of the given mathematician and builds the tree towards its descendants. 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.