I am pleased to announce the first release of the Mathematics Genealogy Grapher (Geneagrapher) package. The Geneagrapher has been around for a couple years, but it was previously only a web-based tool. At this time the original version is still available on my old site. This package is written in Python, so users will need to have Python installed (get it here).

Here are the most significant changes, from the perspective of the user:

• Descendant trees. Now trees can be built placing a starting node at the top and graphing all of its descendants. A couple points on this:
  • These sorts of graphs tend to have a lot of “fan out” because some people have a lot of students.
  • Be careful. Do not inadvertently (or intentionally!) run a job that requests the data for thousands of nodes.
• Better character handling. I believe all characters are now displayed correctly, as long as the generated dot file is processed by Graphviz a certain way (see the Geneagrapher 0.2 Usage Guide).
• No limit on the number of starting nodes.
• This is a client application, meaning the user installs it somewhere and runs it there. Furthermore, this package only generates the input file to Graphviz, so that also needs to be installed. This is probably more of a hassle than most Geneagrapher users want to go through (not all, though), but this is just the first step.

Additionally, behind-the-scenes changes happened:

• Large portions of the code were rewritten.
• Added a test suite to make it more maintainable. In particular, this should allow quicker diagnosis and modifications when the Mathematics Genealogy Project pages have changed.

Getting the Package

For downloading and installation information, see the Geneagrapher Page.

Instructions

Usage examples are in the Geneagrapher 0.2 Usage Guide.

Earlier this year I spent some time cleaning up (and rewriting portions) of the geneagrapher tool. I intend to release the source as soon as I get it packaged, but want to take this opportunity to list some of the properties and features of the upcoming release.

• Command-line based. The previous geneagrapher was designed to be completely web-based. I have written this one so that other people can use the tool on their machines.
• Produces Graphviz dot files. Processing the file is left to the user.
• The ability to generate trees with ancestors and/or descendants. The original tool only had the ability to generate ancestor trees, primarily because a descendant tree can be very large.
• The tool works by crawling the Math Genealogy site, and each time the site’s design changes, the originally geneagrapher tool breaks. This new version has a number of tests that will help to detect when this happens earlier and to hasten the time needed to adjust.