get_genealogy: Retrieve genealogy tree by mathematician ID

In maths.genealogy: Mathematics PhD Genealogy Data and Plotting

Retrieve genealogy tree by mathematician ID

Description

Queries the genealogy of a single or set of mathematicians by their ID in the Mathematics Genealogy Project.

Usage

get_genealogy(id, ancestors = TRUE, descendants = TRUE)

Arguments

id	integer vector of IDs of mathematicians for whom the genealogy should be retrieved
ancestors	logical indicating whether to include the genealogy backward to include all ancestors, defaults to TRUE. This can be a single logical(1) which then applies to all mathematicians referenced in the id argument, or it can be a vector of the same length as id providing different selection for each individual.
descendants	logical indicating whether to include the genealogy forward to include all descendants, defaults to TRUE. This can be a single logical(1) which then applies to all mathematicians referenced in the id argument, or it can be a vector of the same length as id providing different selection for each individual.

Value

A list object of class genealogy. Each element of the list represents a mathematician in the genealogical tree. The name of the element is the mathematician's ID in the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Each element of the object is list with containing:

id

integer(1) with Mathematician's ID;

name

character(1) containing the full name of the mathematician;

institution

character(1) containing the institution at which PhD was obtained;

year

integer(1) with the year their PhD was completed;

descendants

integer vector of IDs of any mathematicians who were supervised by this individual for their PhD;

advisors

integer vector of IDs of any mathematicians who were supervisors of this individual for their PhD.

In addition, there is an attribute named start_nodes which contains an integer vector of IDs indicating the origin nodes used in the genealogical tree search that produced this object. In other words, the id argument as passed to this function.

References

Alber, D. (2024). “'geneagrapher-core' package”, https://github.com/davidalber/geneagrapher-core

Jackson, A. (2007). “A Labor of Love: The Mathematics Genealogy Project”, Notices of the AMS, 54(8), 1002-1003. https://www.ams.org/notices/200708/tx070801002p.pdf

Mulcahy, C. (2017). “The Mathematics Genealogy Project Comes of Age at Twenty-one”, Notices of the AMS, 64(5), 466-470. https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201705/rnoti-p466.pdf

Examples

# First, you need to use search_id() to find the mathematician ID for the
# individual(s) you wish to plot, or visit https://mathgenealogy.org/ to look
# up in the browser. Once you have these IDs the get_genealogy() function will
# retrieve the genealogical tree.

# For example, to find the package author would search for themselves using
search_id("Aslett", "Louis")

# Then, use the id to retrieve the genealogy
g <- get_genealogy(171971)

# With that genealogy, you can then plot using plot_grviz() or other plotting
# functions.

maths.genealogy documentation built on Aug. 8, 2025, 7:33 p.m.