Update: the images would not show on the Commons website, so the link to my map is here:
I changed my initial project because I decided I would do something a bit more personal. As such, I was determined to map my math genealogy. According to their website, The Math Genealogy Project aims to “compile information about ALL the mathematicians in the world.” , and for any individual who has received a doctorate in mathematics, the website shows:
“
- The complete name of the degree recipient
- The name of the university which awarded the degree
- The year in which the degree was awarded
- The complete title of the dissertation
- The complete name(s) of the advisor(s)”
I can’t recall where I first heard of the website, but I know it was one of my previous math professors who mentioned it to me. Note: as this website lists any individual who has earned a doctorate in mathematics, I am not actually on the site since I only have a master’s degree in math, so this map does not include where I attended college. On the MGP website, after you enter the name of, say, your advisor, you keep clicking on successive advisors and move backwards chronologically. Because of the functionality of the website, I had to create the data set myself based on each entry, which was somewhat tedious. I initially tried a different math advisor, but the scope of their genealogical locations was not broad enough to make a compelling map and there were too many duplicate locations. As a result, I moved on a second advisor to create the data set I used for the map. Upon initially using this website years ago, I was surprised to learn that my math lineage included both Laplace and Poisson, two famous, brilliant, and influential mathematicians. Knowing this made me feel like I descended from math royalty—if there is such a thing. My math genealogy started in Paris, France and had stops across America, but none farther west than Austin, TX—ending where my advisor earned his PhD, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In all, it includes two countries and 8 cities. It spans from 1735 to 1980, when my advisor earned his PhD. If I achieved a PhD in mathematics today, I would be the 125,812th descendant of my mathematical apical ancestor.
When I first uploaded the data set, the only location field I had was “City”. Unfortunately, that was not sufficient to map all the locations because clearly some city names are duplicates. I should have thought of that before. Ultimately, I went back to the data set and added “State” and “Country” fields so that Tableau could works its magic and more easily narrow down the location. This worked and my locations were mapped with points at each city.
I then had each dot on the map labeled by city name and the number of descendants from the doctorate in question underneath the city name. At this point, I thought the map was decent, but I figured I could add more depth to it.
From the original map I created, unless I added the year as a label, there would be no way for anyone to determine the chronological order of events, so to make the map more visually appealing I wanted to created arcs that appeared in reverse chronological order from one city to the next. Well, first, I wanted to include arcs and then I wanted to animate them, so they popped up from one city to the next in chronological order, so I set out to try to animate my map. Creating the arcs proved more difficult than I expected. I followed directions I found online very specifically, and I found it incredibly cumbersome. I had to completely revise the structure of my data set which left me very annoyed. Instead of creating arcs between the points like what I saw in the example, it mapped everything to a single point in Canada (note: none of the locations in my data set are in in Canada). I was very confused. I concluded that some of the duplicates in my data set (where the advisor and doctoral student earned their degree from the same institution) may have been messing up the pathway I created so I tried to remove the duplicate rows (which didn’t affect the route because the city was repeated to see what happened). This somehow worked! My genealogy was routed on the map – though without any points at the cities, just apexes where the arcs met. I then figured out how to create two maps, one with the points and the other with arcs, and combined them to make my final map.
Ultimately, I was able to figure out how to animate the map, but only by using filters which was not what I want. Ideally, I would like the map to open and for the viewer to see a point bouncing on arcs from city to city. I am not quite there yet.
Though what I describe above only took a few paragraphs to explain, I spent a significant amount of time learning how to generally operate Tableau and constructing my data set so that it had optimal functionality when I uploaded it. Putting the finishing details on the map at the end took the most time out of everything.
