Yesterday's Challenge:  

Who is my (meaning me, Dan Russell's) great-great-great-great-great-great-great advisor?   (And why is that an incredibly cool thing to know?) 

That is, who was my advisor's-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor was (back 7 PhD generations).

Answer:  Simeon Denis Poisson (one of the greatest mathematicians of the early 19th century).  

Simeon Denis Poissonmy advisor's-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor-advisor
(Image from Wikimedia)

How to find out:  Well, by now you know who my advisor is--Jerome Feldman.  (He was my advisor at the University of Rochester, although he is now at UC Berkeley.)  He's been the advisor for a LOT of students.  (As someone pointed out, I work with 4 other Feldman students at Google.)  

But probably the simplest way to figure out my great (* 7) advisor is to use The Mathematics Genealogy Project advisor tool.  If you start with my name and work backwards - Daniel Russell  - you'll find that I'm a descendent of S. D. Poisson.  

And the simplest way to discover the Genealogy Project advisor tool is to search for my name and the title of my thesis.  Like this: 

     [ Daniel Martin Russell "Schema based problem solving" ] 

The Genealogy Project tool shows up pretty high in that list. As several readers pointed out, once you do the search and notice that there's a tool labeled "genealogy," the rest is simple.  

Why use my full name in the search?  

Lesson 1: Because different kinds of sites use different conventions for naming individuals. For genealogies, typically you want to use the full name.  (But be careful; you still might have to hunt around on name variations.  Geoffry vs. Jeffry vs. Jeffery, etc.)  I used my full name here because I know that this is the convention for official documents (and the PhD degrees are very, very formalized).  

And then, you just work backwards from me: 

Daniel Martin Russell (1985)  

Jerome Arthur Feldman (1964)  - advisor 

Alan Jay Perlis (1950) - grandadvisor *1 

Phillip Franklin (1921) - * 2 

Oswald Veblen (1903) - * 3 

E. H. (Eliakim Hastings) Moore (1885) - * 4 

H. A. (Hubert Anson) Newton (1850) - * 5 

Michel Chasles (1814) - * 6 

Simeon Denis Poisson (1800) - * 7  

And of course Poisson's advisors were the even more famous mathematicians / physicists Joseph Louis Lagrange (1754) and Pierre-Simon Laplace (~1760).  

Still, I like Poisson as one of my great-advisors because his Poisson distribution is used so often in statistics and computer science. (1)   When I first learned about a Poisson distribution and figured out how it works, I felt... empowered.  It sounds silly, I know, but for the first time in my undergraduate career, I felt as though I'd learned something that I would never have figured out on my own.  It was my first moment of mathematical awe and surprise. 

I never imagined that I was intellectually related to the man himself.  That was a second great surprise.  

But perhaps the best / coolest thing is that his name is one of 72 French geniuses inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.  (As both Sarah and Ramón pointed out.)  

Lesson 2: Be sure to look for a tool that can do the computation for you.  Sometimes (especially for repeated information links, like we see in this kind of a problem), you'll find a tool that will do the heavy lifting for you.  

More on parrotfish tomorrow. 

Search on! 

_____ 

(1) Background: In the context of queueing theory the Poisson distribution is a pretty good model for how items arrive into a queue that needs to be managed.  Queues are pretty fundamental to the way all computers work, so everyone in CS needs to learn this at one point or another.