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Most of the other replies focus on the unfortunate (and valid) political aspects: that having an important advisor helps your career via contacts and higher li

by rjtobin 10y ago

Most of the other replies focus on the unfortunate (and valid) political aspects: that having an important advisor helps your career via contacts and higher likelihood of being published in top journals. But I don't think this is in the spirit of the question asked, which seems to be about whether someone's advisor has an impact on the sort of work they do (in terms of 'flavor' instead of academic impact). Definitely the advisor usually has a big role here. Even within a given subfield, the sort of problems one decides to tackle is a very subjective thing, and the sort of problems your advisor works on / presents to you has a big influence on this. Then personal taste gets mixed in, and you get a fairly unique brand which then influences your own students and so forth (in a vaguely "genetic" way). And anecdotally, I've heard so often from professors about how their advisor's take on mathematics has influenced their own, so it does seems to be a factor. Honestly though it seems a bit dubious that these 24 "families" share anything apart from their common ancestor ~500 years ago. If I'm an descendent of Leibniz and you are a descendent of d'Alembert, I don't think there are any interesting qualities about our research that we could guess from just that information. To use the analogy implicit in the article, the "genes" have all become uniformly distributed through the population by now.

vidarh 10y ago
As an example of "flavor" (picked because it's a field I have a particular interest in; with people I've "followed" peripherally for many years): Former CTO of Mozilla, Andreas Gal, who wrote TraceMonkey, had professor Michael Franz as advisor. Gal's thesis was on tracing JITs. Michael Franz had Niklaus Wirth as advisor. Franz' thesis was on JITs - he contributed a technique called Semantic Dictionary Encoding, which was added to Oberon to allow architecture independent binaries. (Franz' thesis pre-dates the public release of Java by two years). Niklaus Wirth, obviously having a long history of compilers behind him. Presumably that's quite unavoidable - most of the dissertations of Wirth's PhD students I've seen are on compiler technology, for obvious reasons: if you wanted to study under Wirth badly enough to in many cases move to a different country in order to do so, presumably odds were good that's where your interests were. Franz even declined a Fulbright Scholarship in order to continue studying under Wirth. He then went on to continue work on code generation in various forms at UC Irvine - presumably most people, like Gal, seeking him out for a PhD would be people interested in the same areas. Of course you will then be influenced - after all you hopefully don't seek out an adviser to ignore their advice...
GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
For me, there's a vague similarity of research interest going back at least five generations.
deleted 10y ago
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by rjtobin 10y ago

vidarh 10y ago

As an example of "flavor" (picked because it's a field I have a particular interest in; with people I've "followed" peripherally for many years): Former CTO of Mozilla, Andreas Gal, who wrote TraceMonkey, had professor Michael Franz as advisor. Gal's thesis was on tracing JITs. Michael Franz had Niklaus Wirth as advisor. Franz' thesis was on JITs - he contributed a technique called Semantic Dictionary Encoding, which was added to Oberon to allow architecture independent binaries. (Franz' thesis pre-dates the public release of Java by two years). Niklaus Wirth, obviously having a long history of compilers behind him. Presumably that's quite unavoidable - most of the dissertations of Wirth's PhD students I've seen are on compiler technology, for obvious reasons: if you wanted to study under Wirth badly enough to in many cases move to a different country in order to do so, presumably odds were good that's where your interests were. Franz even declined a Fulbright Scholarship in order to continue studying under Wirth. He then went on to continue work on code generation in various forms at UC Irvine - presumably most people, like Gal, seeking him out for a PhD would be people interested in the same areas. Of course you will then be influenced - after all you hopefully don't seek out an adviser to ignore their advice...

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

For me, there's a vague similarity of research interest going back at least five generations.

deleted 10y ago

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