In Search of the Ur-Faculty Advisor

Some academics, especially mathematicians, like to play a genealogical game, in which their faculty advisor, usually their Ph.D. advisor, is considered a parent. They then enjoy tracing their intellectual forebears into distant antiquity. I was rather bored today, so I decided to trace my own academic genealogy. On an earlier attempt, I became lost in Scottish surgeons of the 19th century, but the Mathematics Genealogy Project at North Dakota State University opened up a completely different genealogical path in Germany, a country with a stronger tradition (or better records) of faculty advising.

Eight generations back, I encountered Bunsen (of burner fame).

Sixteen generations back, I discovered my academic ancestors were Lutheran apologists, mainly educated at the University of Wittenberg.

Twenty four generations back, I found Nicholas Copernicus, a man whose contributions to modern astronomy are somewhat overestimated but whose work on the revolutions of the planets was the first shot of the Scientific Revolution.

Copernicus's academic ancestors were medieval astronomers at the University of Vienna. So twenty nine generations back, I found the great reforger of the University of Vienna, Henry of Langenstein, who wrote about planetary science in the sense that he argued that the appearance of a comet did not portend any future event.

The funny thing is that Henry of Langenstein (and the Byzantine scholar, Gemistos Pletho) are the oldest scholars listed by the Mathematics Genealogy Project at North Dakota State University. In some sense, they are the ur-faculty advisors of science. Scientific genealogies generally end there.

But did they have advisors? The unadvised advisor is even more unlikely than an unmoved mover. Well, maybe Socrates was the unadvised advisor. But the discontinuity between Plato's Academy and the medieval universities of the West makes it hard to connect Socrates and me, though Pletho indeed could be the link.

So I decided to trace Henry of Langenstein further. In theology, he seems to have been advised by a Cistercian master of some obscurity, but scientifically, it is often claimed he was influenced by Jean Buridan, who taught in the Faculty of Arts at Paris. (You should google "Buridan's ass.")

Buridan probably was most influenced by the instruction of William of Ockham (of Ockham's Razor fame). Considering the influence of the principle of parsimony, Ockham really could be the ur-faculty advisor of natural science. Yet it is claimed by some authors that Ockham may have received instruction from John Duns Scotus, the Postulant's chief philosopher of expertise. And coincidentally, Scottish. The trail then grows cold in the midst of the faculty of the Franciscan studium generale at Oxford.

So after thirty-two generations of graduate students, we have progressed from Scotus to me. Darn, I was hoping for Aquinas.