Just as retirees scour FamilyTree.com for evidence that they’re descendants of famous people, mathematicians are diagramming who their adviser was advised by, who their adviser’s adviser’s adviser was, and so forth. This nerdy pastime has been formalized on the Mathematics Genealogy Project website, run by North Dakota State University. There’s some scientific usefulness to this—a team at Northwestern used the database to discover that more mentoring corresponds with higher publication rates.

via Math Masters Trace Their Intellectual Lineage | Magazine | Wired.com.