Philip Resnik's Academic Geneology

The TL;DR is that I've been influenced by three main lines of intellectual descent.

• One line, through my advisor Aravind Joshi, is a lineage primarily in mathematics. This purer form of math has not been as strong an influence on my intellectual life because Aravind himself, by the time I had the good fortune to work with him, had long since shifted his focus away from that to lines of thinking in cognitive science influenced by his interactions with Zelig Harris.

• I trace the second line through Zelig Harris, not only because of the clear intellectual line-of-descent influence on Aravind as my advisor, but also because Lila Gleitman, while not my advisor, was a mentor at Penn and one of the strongest influences on how I think about things, and she also engaged signficantly with Harris. A Harris-based line traces back through generations of language (philology) and theology scholars, though interestingly there seems to be a definite theme of people who were taking a more rationalist than religious angle.

• Finally, also through Harris, there is a fascinating line of descent that runs through astronomy and captures the historical progression from religious and philosophical thinking to scientific thinking.

Of course it's easy to rationalize post hoc, but all this feels to me like it makes good sense: I'm descended from a combination of mathematics (well, computation, but the two go hand in hand; my undergrad class entering in Fall 1983 was the first one that could declare CS as a major, rather than studying it as a part of applied math), and language, and empirically driven natural sciences. Not just one, but all three. That's pretty cool.

Student	Advisor(s)	Dissertation Year	University	Dissertation Title	Brief notes
Philip Resnik	Aravind Krishna Joshi	1993	University of Pennsylvania	Selection and Information : A Class-Based Approach to Lexical Relationships	Although Aravind was my official advisor, I was lucky enough to have what I think of as an amazing "advisory cloud" at Penn that also included Mitch Marcus, Mark Steedman, Bonnie Webber, Mark Liberman, and Lila Gleitman. (Plus of course the many incredible student colleagues.) Lila was in many ways my true mentor in terms of her influence on how I think about research, and she's a main reason that I emerged from Penn not only as an applications-oriented NLP person but also a cognitive scientist, so I include her below. I was also influenced as an undergraduate by Bill Woods (important figure in early NLP; dissertation titled "Semantics for a Question Answering System", 1968), who was also later my boss at Sun Microsystems Labs. Woods was advised by Susumu Kuno (dissertation titled "Automatic Syntactic Analysis of English", 1964) and with Kuno he was a reader for my undergraduate honors thesis (which was kindly supervised by linguist John Whitman well outside his comfort zone). Via Woods and Kuno my intellectual lineage goes back to Nathaniel Bowditch, "an early American mathematician remembered for his work on ocean navigation ... often credited as the founder of modern maritime navigation".
Lila Gleitman	Zellig Sabbetai Harris	1967	University of Pennsylvania		Key figure in cognitive science and especially the study of child language acquisition; co-founded UPenn's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. Although I list Harris here as her advisor, her obit in the New York Times notes that as she followed Chomsky's intellectual break with Harris it led to "a split so bitter that he refused to oversee her dissertation". (I'm not sure who officially oversaw her thesis; if you happen to, please let me know!)
Aravind Krishna Joshi	Seymour Sherman	1960	University of Pennsylvania	Some Applications of Information Theory and a Generalization of Normalized Entropy	Key figure in computational linguistics; co-founded UPenn's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. I (along with a lot of others, I think) believed that Zelig Harris was Joshi's advisor. However David Chiang dug into this, actually inter-library-loaning Joshi's dissertation, and found that the advisor of record was actually Seymour Sherman. I followed up with Mitch Marcus to get the fuller story. In a nutshell, Mitch reports that Aravind's early work was entirely about information theory/communication theory and, except for one paper in 1958, all of his papers until 1964 were in that area. But then, influenced by Harris, Aravind abandoned information theory per se and pursued the computational work that his interaction with Harris led to. Mitch notes that the birth of cognitive science at Penn was the interaction among the grad students working for Harris, and not Harris himself --- Aravind, Lila, and Carol Chomsky (who did her undergrad at Penn and her PhD at Harvard).
Seymour Sherman	John Adam Fitz Randolph	1940	Cornell	A Comparison of Linear Measures in the Plane	Academic grandchild of David Hilbert (!), which takes the ancestry back to Carl Friedrich Gauss (!!), and from there back to Leibniz (!!!).
Zellig Sabbetai Harris	James Alan Montgomery	1934	University of Pennsylvania	A Grammar of the Phoenician Language	Key figure in structural linguistics and more generally the "mathematical and empirical foundations of the science of language" (Wikipedia). Strongly influenced Noam Chomsky, including convincing him to study linguistics as an undergrad.
James Alan Montgomery	Hermann Vollrat Hilprecht	1904	University of Pennsylvania	The Samaritans; The Earliest Jewish Sect; Their History, Theology and Literature	Clergyman, Oriental scholar, and biblical scholar
Hermann Vollrat Hilprecht	Friedrich Delitzsch and Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer	1883	Universität Leipzig	Freibrief Nebukadnezar's I, Königs von Babylonien c. 1130 v. Chr. zum ersten Mal veröffentlicht, umschrieben und übersetzt	German-American Assyriologist and archaeologist, also with a healthy dose of theology.
Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer	Unknown	1824	Universität Leipzig	De Glossis Habichtianis In Quatuor Priores Tomos MI Noctium: Dissertatio Critica	Specialist in theology and "oriental languages" (Arabic, Turkish, Persian); founded Arabic Studies in Germany. Interesting quote from Wikipedia that strikes me as anticipating a more scientific approach to linguistics: "The question for us is not: What is the purest, the most beautiful and correct Arabic, but what is Arabic in general?"
Friedrich Delitzsch	Franz Julius Delitzsch	1873	Universität Leipzig	Studien über indogermanisch-semitische Wurzelverwandtschaft (Studies on Indo-European-Semitic root relationship)	Deeply anti-semitic German nationalist who specialized in the study of ancient Middle Eastern languages
Franz Julius Delitzsch	Unknown	1836	Universität Leipzig		From Wikipedia: "Delitzsch is considered to be one of the most important Old Testament exegetes of the 19th century. Comprehensively taught, a connoisseur of rabbinical literature, an exegete who combined biblical-theological interpretation with philological meticulousness."

Ok, now, here is where it gets wild. David Chiang pointed out that academictree.org is way more complete. Here are some interesting highlights of my academic ancestry from info there, working backward in time. The tree widget appears below and you can use the "P+" button to go backward in time (and then when it gets too big scroll bars for horizontal and vertical scrolling will show up). Or, to see the whole thing, here's a PDF constructed thanks to David's graciously pointing me to this code.

• Johann Gottfried Eichorn, described as the "founder of modern Old Testament Criticism", who believed that all the supernatural events in the Old Testament happened by natural principles and "did not perceive in the biblical books any religious ideas of much importance for modern times; they interested him merely historically and for the light they cast upon antiquity".

• Wilhelm Gesenius, who "takes much of the credit for having freed Semitic philology from the trammels of theological and religious prepossession, and for inaugurating the strictly scientific (and comparative) method which has since been so fruitful".

• Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann, a classicist I include here because I love the fact that one of the positions he held was "professor of eloquence".

• Georg Wilhelm Hegel -- Hegel!!

• Adriaan Heereboord, a Dutch philosopher and logician who liked the "new thinking" of Descartes, was influenced by Francis Bacon, and was "a combative drinker" whose private life was "the subject of pamphlets".

• Johannes Buxtorf the Younger, who did work on ancient Hebrew; he was the son of a celebrated Hebraist (Buxtorf the Elder), who is referred to as ""Master of the Rabbis" and "was largely responsible for transforming Hebrew studies from an amateur hobby into an established academic discipline in the early seventeenth century"; Buxtorf the Younger completed a number of his father's works, including a Hebrew lexicon and concordance (hey look, corpus data!).

• Tycho Brahe (!) -- described as "the first competent mind in modern astronomy to feel ardently the passion for exact empirical facts" and "the last of the major astronomers to work without telescopes".

• Johannes Kepler (!!)

• Nicolaus Copernicus (!!) Holy crap. I knew there was a reason I did a report on him in 3rd grade.

• Erasmus (!!!) Him too, I forget what grade. And this is through a different lineage from Kepler and Brahe.

• Thomas Cranmer Ok, at this point I'm just going to stop with the exclamation points. (I did think that Cranmer was one of the most interesting characters in Wolf Hall...)

• Martin Luther and Philipp Melancthon. Ok, now, seriously? This is just getting silly.

• Not so silly that I could fail to include William of Ockham, who, incidentally, was the first philosopher to dig into the notion of "mental language". So I've got cognitive science in my heredity dating all the way back to the 1300s!