I spent some time in 02016 digging through different sorts of academic lineages. It turns out, for example, that you can also trace Leibniz back to Copernicus: <a href="https://dercuano.github.io/notes/academic-lineage.html" rel="nofollow">https://dercuano.github.io/notes/academic-lineage.html</a><p>Thrun's page seems to have an error about Leibniz: "Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1966, 1967, 1976"<p>It would be nice to be able to trace figures like al-Tusi back to Plato and Imhotep, to know if there really was an unbroken line of personal mentorship the way there is in the Buddhist lineages, or if at some point the oral line was severed. Perhaps during the Roman rampages through Greece, the line of transmission of philosophy only survived in Alexandria, or less plausibly, somewhere in India, only to resurface in Arabia while Europe was sunken into its Dark Ages. Or perhaps it had to be recovered from the few manuscripts the Christians hadn't yet recycled into hymnals, like the Archimedes Palimpsest.<p>We know that somewhere between Eudoxus and Galileo the idea of freely postulated axiom systems was lost, and it was not really fully rediscovered until the 19th century.