mathgenealogy

Discover your (academic) ancestors!

A command line program for extracting data from the Mathematics Genealogy Project (http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/index.php). Note that this database also contains many entries of computer scientists.

Lookup your entry at http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/index.php and then use that URL as a command line argument. For example, if Carl Gauss wanted to explore his academic ancestors, he would type

mathgenealogy http://genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=18231

which produces the directed acyclic graph http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22490968/genealogy_of_gauss.svg. See

mathgenealogy --help

for the complete list of options. Requires the dot program, which is part of the GraphViz package (version 2.28.0 or later!) to run.

Note: Due to some inconsistencies in the character encodings used on mathgenealogy, you might need to correct entries that use special characters.

Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!

Changes in 1.4.0:

• Updated to handle changes in page layout.

Changes in 1.3.0:

• Switched to HTML-like labels in GraphViz. This is required for the advanced font formatting options. ATTENTION: this needs a recent installation of GraphViz (Linux: 2.28.0; MacOS: 2.29) and will yield best results for SVG output files. If you have an older version of GraphViz or run into issues, try the '--oldtextlabels' option.

• Downloaded entries are stored locally. This avoids re-downloading the same data if you want to generate multiple graphs of the same entry with different formatting options.

• Added more options for fine-tuning the fonts and colors. (requested by users)

• Default output is now SVG, as this is the format best supported by GraphViz.

Changes in 1.2.0:

• Fixed handling of entries that have multiple degrees. (reported by Dima Pasechnik)

Changes in 1.1.1:

• Provide error message when given invalid start URL

• Documentation and code cleanup

Changes in 1.0.0:

• Choice between PDF and PNG output

• Optional inclusion of PhD theses in output

Changes in 0.0.2:

• Fixed handling of trailing commas (reported by Alexander Koessler)