Computational Prosopography across a Millennium: Mathematically Oriented Lineages Traced from the Fields Medalists

Abstract

We reconstruct the mentor--student network through which documented scholarly training passed across roughly nine centuries, and subject both the network and the means of reconstructing it to source criticism. From Wikidata, which aggregates the Mathematics Genealogy Project and the MacTutor Archive, we extract approximately 470,000 mentor--student assertions, yielding a directed acyclic graph of 372,853 persons. Using all 64 historical Fields Medalists as a fixed, ex ante tracer set, backward traversal enumerates some 25.5 million distinct paths reaching 57 generations. Three structural observations follow. Genealogical traffic through Leibniz forms an hourglass: thin upstream, 5.3 paths per node on average, and thick downstream, 53.4, a ratio near 10:1, with no counterpart at Newton, who lies on only four of the 64 lineages. Across a window centered on Leibniz, seven independently extracted predicate dimensions reorganize together, and recorded learned-society membership rises from 6.5 to 82.1 percent of the cohort. Upstream, 54 of the 64 lineages converge on the same five twelfth- and thirteenth-century Islamic and Byzantine scholars before terminating at an eleventh-century boundary we name the Monastery Wall. We argue that such observations cannot be assessed without tool criticism. The traversal engine is algebraically reversible, so every ranking decision it makes can be reconstructed afterward. We characterize its measurement bias in closed form, show that the macro-structures survive switching that bias off, and report the family of lineages the traversal returns at different resolutions rather than a single ranked list.