Academic genealogy is definitely easier to trace back than family, especially when most of the people involved have entries on Wikipedia. How much knowledge gets passed down the chain?
I often find myself at the interface between chemistry and physics, which is mirrored by the split between Richard Catlow and Marshall Stoneham. One path leads to the birth of computational chemistry in the United Kingdom (Lennard-Jones and his ubiquitous inter-atomic potential), while the other includes some of the pioneers of scientific computing (von Neumann) and quantum physics (Pauli). Tracing the links back even further towards the 19th century leads to Sommerfeld (theory of electrons in metals) and towards the 18th century to the polymath Gauss (Gaussian distributions and Gauss' Law).
This group would make for an interesting Christmas dinner, although, I think I'd end up feeling like the country cousin.
