Ned Birdsall's Academic Ancestry

Abstract

I briefly describe Ned Birdsall's doctoral research on microwave devices at Stanford, and his interaction with Lester Field, who was his official thesis advisor, and Marvin Chodorow, who was second reader of his thesis and a more important mentor. Considering only proven official thesis advisors, Ned's ancestry can be traced back to Edward Leamington Nichols, founder of Physical Review, and then to C. F. Gauss. If other important mentors are included, then Ned's direct ancestors include Eugene Wigner and Percy Bridgman as great-grandfathers, as well as Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and Lavoisier. By this expanded definition, Max Planck is a brother of E. L. Nichols, being a fellow student of Helmholtz and Kirchhoff, whereas Sigmund Freud is their first cousin on one side, and Felix Klein, a direct ancestor of Einstein, Heisenberg, and Born, is their first cousin on the other side. Other direct ancestors include John Trowbridge, an early plasma physicist whose 1873 doctoral thesis at Harvard included research on the electrical properties of gas flames. Earlier ancestors, going back hundreds of years, are also discussed, and these early ancestors are likely shared by almost every living physicist.