My Professional Lineage

 

 

C H Lai

 

In 1998, APS News announced a PhD lineage contest, in which entrants were asked to trace their professional “family tree” – i.e. the production of doctoral level physicists by their thesis advisors – so far as back as possible. 

(See http://www.aps.org/apsnews/0399/039916.html for the winners.)

 

I thought I would see how far mine goes, and the following is the result of my “research”:

 

  1. Chris Quigg supervised my PhD thesis at Fermilab/The University of Chicago.

 

 

  1. Chris was one of the students of J. David Jackson (yes, the “Classical Electrodynamics” Jackson) at the University of California at Berkeley.

 

 

  1. David Jackson carried out his PhD thesis research under Viki Weisskopf at MIT.  [See J. David Jackson, SNAPSHOTS OF A PHYSICIST'S LIFE, Annu. Rev. Nucl. Part. Sci. 1999, Vol. 49: 1-33.]

 

 

  1. Viki Weisskopf went to Gottingen in 1928 and received his PhD under Max Born in 1931.  [Abraham Pais, The Genius of Science – A portrait gallery of twentieth-century physicists, Oxford University Press, 2000.]

 

 

  1. Max Born took his doctorate in 1907 at the University of Gottingen. [Abraham Pais, The Genius of Science – A portrait gallery of twentieth-century physicists, Oxford University Press, 2000.]  The track is lost here.

 

 

Not bad for a village boy from Ipoh, Malaysia!