Famous ancestry is an interesting and often humourous path to track. Our family tree tracing project (Kulvrittanta in Marathi) was headquartered in our house a few years ago; it has since been published. One of the designers of Pune's Laxmi Road and Mandai is my great-great-grandfather ;)

Academic ancestry is also very interesting. One of the most interesting things people are curious about are their Erdoös Numbers i.e. how many co-author links away you are from Paul Erdoös. The Erdoös Number Project studies research collaboration among mathematicians. The humourous take on that is The Extended Erdoös Number Project (via 11011110) which shows Matt Damon having an Erdoös number of 3, Joan Baez 3, and a 20 month old child with 4.

The PhD thesis advisor's advisor tracing is at The Mathematics Genealogy Project. My advisor has an entry, so one of my advisor ancestor graphs and claim to great heritage ;) is:
? -> Erhard Weigel -> Gottfried Leibnitz -> Jacob Bernoulli -> Johann Bernoulli -> Leonhard Euler -> Joseph Lagrange -> Simeon Poisson -> Gustav Dirichlet -> Rudolph Lipschitz -> C.Felix-Klein -> William Story -> Solomon Lefshetz -> Henry Wallman -> Alan Macnee -> Arch Naylor -> Michael Stonebraker -> Sunita Sarawagi -> Me :)

Simple graph drawn here using GraphViz.

Wow - Leibnitz boss of Bernoulli boss of Euler boss of Lagrange boss of Poisson boss of Dirichlet boss of Lipschitz - what a crew!

Tags: academic genealogy, advisor, ancestor, erdos number, humour, mathematics, social network