My academic father is
Peter M. Neumann.
I was awarded the D.Phil. degree by Oxford
University in 1971; my thesis was called "Structure of suborbits in some
primitive permutation groups". My grandfather is
Graham Higman,
and my great-grandfather
Henry Whitehead.
The sequence continues back to
O. Veblen,
E. H. Moore,
H. A. Newton,
M. Chasles,
S. D. Poisson,
and
J.-L. Lagrange.
The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive describes Lagrange as "largely self-taught", but the
Mathematics Genealogy Project, after making the statement
"No dissertation, no advisor, but we show a link to Euler to show a
connection in our intellectual heritage"
Note added 8 June 2010: The MGP has added a lot more entries and links
to its database for mediaeval and renaissance mathematicians. Allowing multiple
supervisors, I now have many lines of descent, and my ancestry includes such
luminaries as Luca Pacioli (who, according to Vasari, stole the results of Piero
della Francesca) and Nicolaus Copernicus.
Here is a picture of me with Peter Neumann and many of my students, taken
at Ambleside in August 2007.
