undecided

My advisor’s advisor was trained as a musician.  As such, I can’t trace my academic genealogy back to early mathematicians or scientists like some of my friends.  My lineage can, however, be traced back to some very famous musicians.  Paris Smaragdis, my academic uncle, traced his musical lineage back to the 1600s (see [here]).  According to Paris, I’m 9 steps removed from Beethoven, 7 steps from Liszt, 10 steps from Haydn, and 13 steps from Bach!

Although if you consider that Thomas Quatieri supervised my advisor’s masters thesis, my genealogy becomes a who’s who of signal processing, and my lineage can be traced to Kant in 9 steps.

Pride is a very funny thing, and the whole exercise reminds me of the Sesame Street song “One of these things is not like the other.”