My PhD Tree
Last week I discovered that somebody has kindly constructed my PhD Tree. I later discovered that similar things have been constructed for quite a few other scientists of my acquaintance. Perhaps even yours?
Anyway, here is my academic lineage. As you can see, I have some distinguished ancestors. In particular, my great-grandfather (academically speaking) was Paul Dirac…
Incidentally, you might like to see Dirac’s hand-written notes for his PhD Thesis, which you can find here. It dates from 1926. As far as I am aware this is the first PhD thesis ever written on the subject of Quantum Mechanics. It’s also worth mentioning the tremendous contribution to British science made by R.H. Fowler. Fifteen Fellows of the Royal Society and three Nobel Laureates (Chandrasekhar, Dirac, and Mott) were supervised by Fowler in Cambridge between 1922 and 1939.
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In the Dark 
June 23, 2015 at 1:47 pm
What is Dirac’s connection to AV Hill in the above scheme? I’m not aware of one, so I’m curious.
June 23, 2015 at 2:02 pm
I had to google Hill to find who he was and the result makes me question that connection. In fact I can find only one webpage which mentions them both and that is Fowler’s Wikipedia entry, which does nothing to further Hill’s “fatherhood” of Dirac (although both were brought up in Bristol).
Dirac didn’t have many research students, did he?
June 23, 2015 at 2:41 pm
I’m not really familiar with Hill. I was always told that Dirac’s supervisor was Fowler. I don’t recall any mention of him in The Strangest Man, either.
However, there is another site that gives Dirac as one of Hill’s descendants:
http://academictree.org/physiology/peopleinfo.php?pid=1716
Is it an error that has propagated from somewhere else?
June 23, 2015 at 3:16 pm
The wartime work is definitely at the bottom of this – Hill was never Fowler’s academic advisor in a formal sense, but in the WW1 ballistics research unit that Hill ran, Fowler was his ‘de facto’ second-in-command from 1916-1919. As already noted, EA Milne and a whole family of Hartrees (father and two sons) worked in the unit too. So the link should definitely go from Hill to Fowler. I’ve found a good description of the wartime work in Fowler’s Royal Society Biographic Memoir (extended obituary), written by Milne
June 23, 2015 at 3:23 pm
I didn’t realise that Fowler was wounded at Gallipoli while he was serving in the Royal Marine Artillery along with A.V. Hill. On Fowler’s wikipedia page it lists Hill as Fowler’s academic advisor, but it’s not obvious that this was anything more than an informal arrangement.
June 23, 2015 at 2:37 pm
They are there on the other tabs on the website?
June 23, 2015 at 2:55 pm
As a physiologist I know quite a lot about Hill (1886-1977), though nothing about Dirac – I guess opposite to most readers here! Anyway, that was the b/g to my comment that I couldn’t see a Hill-Dirac connection. Hill started out as a mathematician – ‘3rd wranger’ in his Cambridge Maths graduating class, which means 3rd in the final rankings – but was by temperament more of a engineer, since his interest was in applied maths. Hill’s key contribution in physiology (and biology more generally) was to show how far you could get applying mathematical and physical ideas and analysis to biological systems, and you could make a good case for him as the founder of biophysics. You can read more about Hill here.
I think I’ve now solved the mystery of the link, since Ralph Fowler seems to have been friends with Hill. Fowler (b 1889) was three years younger than Hill, but they both studied maths at the same Cambridge College, Trinity, so they would undoubtedly have met there. According to Wikipedia they later worked together on ballistics research during WW1 (see Fowler’s Wikipedia entry). So there is a clear link between Hill and Fowler, though to my mind not one we would strictly recognise as scientific ‘ancestry’. Anyway, I might have put a dotted line between Hill and Fowler, but I can see no link between Hill and the much younger Dirac (b. 1902)… though I dare say they would have met via having Fowler as a connection.
June 23, 2015 at 3:21 pm
Indeed, see the comment above about the wartime work and Hill’s and Fowler’s connection. Of course, in those days the PhD as such didn’t really exist in the UK, so an ‘academic advisor’ in the modern sense of it wasn’t necessary. If people did acquire a formal “doctorate”, it was typically done in mid-career by submitting a portfolio of published work for a D.Sc.
June 23, 2015 at 4:09 pm
Some superb information has been posted in the last few hours by contributors to this thread; isn’t the internet wonderful?
June 23, 2015 at 4:18 pm
I was thinking that too. I’d not previously come across Fowler’s name in my various readings (and even writings) on AV Hill… And now, prompted by the this thread, I’ve found that description of Hill & co’s WW1 work in EA Milne’s obit for Fowler. Never seen that described anywhere else.
June 23, 2015 at 4:59 pm
Thanks, Phillip. I will definitely track it down, as the wartime work of people like AV Hill tends to be under-documented compared to their academic scientific history.
June 23, 2015 at 4:36 pm
In fact the PhD wasn’t introduced to the UK until 1917, so the first awards would not have been until a few years after that.
I’ve always wondered who was the supervisor of the first person to be awarded a PhD…
June 23, 2015 at 5:02 pm
Even after that some people never got round to acquiring one..! Sir Andrew Huxley is a famous example.
June 25, 2015 at 9:40 pm
Interesting. Hermann Bondi is the subject of a famous story about risks and the perception of risk, which I recounted in a post on my old blog. Not sure if there’s a definitive source for the anecdote.
July 1, 2015 at 11:11 am
I just found out that my supervisor (and academic “father”) has just been awarded the Dirac medal of the Institute of Physics:
http://www.iop.org/about/awards/gold/dirac/medallists/page_65854.html
That’s nice because he’s Dirac’s academic grandson!