https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20491 Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Advertisement Advertisement Nature * View all journals * Search * My Account Login * Explore content * About the journal * Publish with us * Sign up for alerts * RSS feed 1. nature 2. news 3. article Majority of mathematicians hail from just 24 scientific 'families' Download PDF Download PDF * Published: 26 August 2016 Majority of mathematicians hail from just 24 scientific 'families' * Davide Castelvecchi^ Nature volume 537, pages 20-21 (2016)Cite this article * 2644 Accesses * 396 Citations * 978 Altmetric * Metrics details Subjects * Astronomy and astrophysics * History * Mathematics and computing * Publishing Evolution of mathematics traced using unusually comprehensive genealogy database. [41586_2016_Article_BFnature201620491_Figb] Anecdotally many mathematicians report a shared genealogy with Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, born in 1707. Credit: INTERFOTO/D. H. Teuffen/Mary Evans Picture Library Most of the world's mathematicians fall into just 24 scientific 'families', one of which dates back to the fifteenth century. The insight comes from an analysis of the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP), which aims to connect all mathematicians, living and dead, into family trees on the basis of teacher-pupil lineages, in particular who an individual's doctoral adviser was. The analysis also uses the MGP -- the most complete such project -- to trace trends in the history of science, including the emergence of the United States as a scientific power in the 1920s and when different mathematical subfields rose to dominance^1. [41586_2016_Article_B] Maths whizz solves a master's riddle "You can see how mathematics has evolved in time," says Floriana Gargiulo, who studies networks dynamics at the University of Namur, Belgium and who led the analysis. The MGP is hosted by North Dakota State University in Fargo and co-sponsored by the American Mathematical Society. Since the early 1990s, its organizers have mined information from university departments and from individuals who make submissions regarding themselves or people they know about. As of 25 August, the MGP contained 201,618 entries. As well as doctoral advisers (PhD advisers in recent times) and pupils of academic mathematicians, the organizers record details such as the university that awarded the doctorate. Distinct families [41586_2016_Article_BFnature201620491_Figd] Credit: Source: Gargiulo et al./MGP Previously, researchers had used the MGP to reconstruct their own PhD-family trees, or to see how many 'descendants' a researcher has (readers can do their own search here). Gargiulo's team wanted to make a comprehensive analysis of the entire database and divide it into distinct families, rather than just looking at how many descendants any one person has. After downloading the database, Gargiulo and her colleagues wrote machine-learning algorithms that cross-checked and complemented the MGP data with information from Wikipedia and from scientists' profiles in the Scopus bibliographic database. This revealed 84 distinct family trees with two-thirds of the world's mathematicians concentrated in just 24 of them. The high degree of clustering arises in part because the algorithms assigned each mathematician just one academic parent: when an individual had more than one adviser, they were assigned the one with the bigger network. But the phenomenon chimes with anecdotal reports from those who research their own mathematical ancestry, says MGP director Mitchel Keller, a mathematician at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. "Most of them run into Euler, or Gauss or some other big name," he says. Although the MGP is still somewhat US centric, the goal is for it to become as international as possible, Keller says. [41586_2016_Article_B] Monumental proof to torment mathematicians for years to come Peculiarly, the progenitor of the largest family tree is not a mathematician but a physician: Sigismondo Polcastro, who taught medicine at the University of Padua in Italy in the early fifteenth century. He has 56,387 descendants according to the analysis. The second-largest tree is one started by a Russian called Ivan Dolbnya in the late nineteenth century. Tracking history The authors also tracked mathematical activity by country, which seemed to pinpoint major historical events. Around the time of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the First World War, there is a decline in mathematics PhDs awarded in the region, notes Gargiulo. Between 1920 and 1940, the United States took over from Germany as the country producing the largest number of mathematics PhDs each year. And the ascendancy of the Soviet Union is marked by a peak of PhDs in the 1960s, followed by a relative fall after the break-up of the union in 1991. [41586_2016_Article_BFnature201620491_Figc] Credit: Source: Gargiulo et al./MGP Gargiulo's team also looked at the dominance of mathematical subfields relative to each other. The researchers found that dominance shifted from mathematical physics to pure maths during the first half of the twentieth century, and later to statistics and other applied disciplines, such as computer science. Idiosyncrasies in the field of mathematics could explain why it has the most comprehensive genealogy database of any discipline. "Mathematicians are a bit of a world apart," says Roberta Sinatra, a network and data scientist at Central European University in Budapest who led a 2015 study that mapped the evolution of the subdisciplines of physics by mining data from papers on the Web of Science^2. [41586_2016_Article_B] The bicycle problem that nearly broke mathematics Mathematicians tend to publish less than other researchers, and they establish their academic reputation not so much on how much they publish or on their number of citations, but on who they have collaborated with, including their mentors, she says. "I think it's not a coincidence that they have this genealogy project." At least one discipline is trying to catch up. Historian of astronomy Joseph Tenn of Sonoma State University in California plans by 2017 to launch the AstroGen project to record the PhD advisers and students of astronomers. "I started it," he says, "because so many of my colleagues in astronomy admired and enjoyed perusing the Mathematics Genealogy Project." References 1. Gargiulo, F., Caen, A., Lambiotte, R. & Carletti, T. EPJ Data Sci. http://dx.doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0088-y (2016). 2. Sinatra, R., Deville, P., Szell, M., Wang, D. & Barabasi, A.-L. Nature Physics 11, 791-796 (2015). CAS ADS Article Google Scholar Download references Authors 1. Davide Castelvecchi View author publications You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar Additional information Davide Castelvecchi's genealogy goes back to Leonhard Euler, via Joseph-Louis Lagrange; to Friedrich Leibniz, the father of the co-inventor of calculus; and to thirteenth-century Persian astronomer Shams ad-Din Al-Bukhari. Tweet Facebook LinkedIn Weibo Wechat Related links Related links Related links in Nature Research Text-mining block prompts online response 2015-Nov-20 Crowd-sourcing: Strength in numbers 2014-Feb-26 Scientific families: Dynasty 2013-Jan-16 Related external links The Mathematics Genealogy Project A Labor of Love: The Mathematics Genealogy Project The Astronomy Genealogy Project Rights and permissions Reprints and Permissions About this article Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark Cite this article Castelvecchi, D. Majority of mathematicians hail from just 24 scientific 'families'. Nature 537, 20-21 (2016). https://doi.org/ 10.1038/nature.2016.20491 Download citation * Published: 26 August 2016 * Issue Date: 01 September 2016 * DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2016.20491 Share this article Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: Get shareable link Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Copy to clipboard Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative Download PDF Advertisement Advertisement Explore content * Research articles * News * Opinion * Research Analysis * Careers * Books & Culture * Podcasts * Videos * Current issue * Browse issues * Collections * Subjects * Follow us on Facebook * Follow us on Twitter * Sign up for alerts * RSS feed About the journal * Journal Staff * About the Editors * Journal Information * Our publishing models * Editorial Values Statement * Journal Metrics * Awards * Contact * Editorial policies * History of Nature * Send a news tip Publish with us * For Authors * For Referees * Submit manuscript Search Search articles by subject, keyword or author [ ] Show results from [All journals] Search Advanced search Quick links * Explore articles by subject * Find a job * Guide to authors * Editorial policies Nature (Nature) ISSN 1476-4687 (online) ISSN 0028-0836 (print) nature.com sitemap Nature portfolio * About us * Press releases * Press office * Contact us * * * Discover content * Journals A-Z * Articles by subject * Nano * Protocol Exchange * Nature Index Publishing policies * Nature portfolio policies * Open access Author & Researcher services * Reprints & permissions * Research data * Language editing * Scientific editing * Nature Masterclasses * Nature Research Academies * Research Solutions Libraries & institutions * Librarian service & tools * Librarian portal * Open research * Recommend to library Advertising & partnerships * Advertising * Partnerships & Services * Media kits * Branded content Career development * Nature Careers * Nature Conferences * Nature events Regional websites * Nature Africa * Nature China * Nature India * Nature Italy * Nature Japan * Nature Korea * Nature Middle East Legal & Privacy * Privacy Policy * Use of cookies * Manage cookies/Do not sell my data * Legal notice * Accessibility statement * Terms & Conditions * California Privacy Statement Springer Nature (c) 2022 Springer Nature Limited Close Nature Briefing Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter -- what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. Email address [ ] Sign up [ ] I agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Nature and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy. Close Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing * *