Other stuff

A space for things that don't fit elsewhere.

Academic Genealogy

The American Mathematical Society has developed the concept - the intellectual influence heritage as distinct from the genetic. See the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

I've done a bit of homework on that site and elsewhere and have discovered connections to Hubble, Newton and Galileo!

Here is the 'intellectual genealogy' (supervisors, mentors or major influences), listing degree or thesis date and university; traced via my thesis supervisors:

Michael Dopita (Manchester) 1973
Franz Kahn (Oxford) 1949
Sydney Chapman (Cambridge) 1914
Horace Lamb (Cambridge)  1872
James Clerk Maxwell (Cambridge) 1854 / George Stokes (Cambridge) 1841
William Hopkins (Cambridge) 1830
Adam Sedgwick (Cambridge) 1811
Thomas Jones (Cambridge) 1782
Thomas Postlethwaite (Cambridge) 1756
Stephen Whisson (Cambridge) 1742
Walter Taylor (Cambridge) 1723
Robert Smith (Cambridge) 1715
Roger Cotes (Cambridge) 1706
Isaac Newton (Cambridge) 1668
Isaac Barrow (Cambridge) 1652
Vincenzio Viviani (Firenze)
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (Pisa)
Ostilio Ricci (Brescia)
Niccolò Tartaglia Fontana (Padova)

and also:

Helmut Jerjen (Basel)
Bruno Binggeli (Basel) 1981
Alan Sandage (Caltech) 1953
Edwin Hubble (Chicago) 1917
Edwin B Frost (Potsdam) 1890
Hermann Vogel (Jena) 1868
Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner (Basel) 1859

That's a daunting list...

Canberra region ferns

Anyone interested in the local fern flora might like to take a look at some pages I first published over 10 years ago: Ferns of the Canberra Region.

 

Oh, one more thing: I may have identified some of the Universe's missing baryonic matter (or at very least one of the Milky Way's missing satellites): Clarence, aka Spotty the Lard Cat (left).

Clarence, who belongs (as far as any cat does) to my brother, has strange abilities, beyond those of mortal cats.

Apart from being very hard to find at times, he can warp doorways as he walks through them, and has the ability to attract food by gravitational means...