Benjamin Kuipers

• B.A. in Mathematics, Swarthmore College, 1970.
• Ph.D. in Mathematics, MIT, 1977.

Academic Genealogy

• Benjamin Kuipers (MIT, 1977)
• Marvin Minsky (Princeton, 1954)
  "[Albert] Tucker was official thesis advisor. But he was mainly a topologist, and
  [John] Tukey was the faculty member with closest interests in my work.
  John von Neumann at the IAS was the one who convinced them that
  my neural net theories would be important in the future.
  But actually it was Lloyd Shapley, a fellow graduate student
  and a world-class game-theorist, who actually read the thesis in detail.
  So, really, the 'academic genealogy' is conceptually somewhat defective."

• Albert Tucker (Princeton, 1932)
• Solomon Lefschetz (Clark U., 1911)
• William Edward Story (Leipzig, 1875)
• C. Felix Klein (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1868)
• Rudolf Lipschitz (Berlin, 1853)
• Gustav Dirichlet (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1827)
• Simeon Poisson and Jean-Baptiste Fourier
• Joseph Lagrange (mentored by Euler, from about 1754)
• Leonhard Euler (Basel, 1726)
• Johann Bernoulli (1694)
• Jacob Bernoulli
• Gottfried Leibniz (Altdorf, 1666)
• Erhard Weigel (Leipzig, 1650)

Here's a branch through another advisor of William Edward Story:

• William Edward Story (Leipzig, 1875)
• Carl Gottfried Neumann (Konigsberg, 1856)
• Friedrich Julius Richelot (Konigsberg, 1831)
• Karl Gustaf Jacob Jacobi (Berlin, 1825)
• Enno Heeren Dirksen (Göttingen, 1820)
• Johann Tobias Meyer d.J. (Göttingen, 1773)
• Abraham Gotthelf Kästner (Leipzig, 1739)
• Christian August Hausen (Halle-Wittenberg, 1713)
• Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen (Leipzig, 1685)
• Otto Mencke

This branch, through another advisor of Felix Klein, includes Gauss and links back to Kästner:

• C. Felix Klein (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1868)
• Julius Plücker (Philipps-Universität, Marburg, 1823)
• Christian Gerling (Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, 1812)
• Carl Friedrich Gauss (Helmstedt, 1799)
• Johann Friedrich Pfaff (Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, 1786)
• Abraham Kästner (Leipzig, 1739)
• ...

(With a previous version, I had written: "At one point, I was very excited to think that Gauss was one of my direct academic ancestors, but alas updated information suggests that he is only my ninth cousin, seven times removed, with common ancestor Abraham Kästner. A lot of Minsky's descendents still have the Gauss ancestry listed. If MGP changes their mind, I'll happily change it back." So they did, and I have.)

(Thanks also to information gleaned from academic genealogy listings for theoretical computer science and AI, and for personal academic genealogies created by Eric Paulos and Haym Hirsh.)

See this page for my academic descendants.

Erdos Number

Benjamin Kuipers -- Sebastian Thrun -- Daphne Koller -- Nimrod Megiddo -- Miklos Ajtai -- Paul Erdos.

At most 4.

Benjamin Kuipers -- Karl J. Astrom (Erdos number 3).

At most 3.

Benjamin Kuipers -- Andrew B. Whinston (Erdos number 2).