It's a common desire to want to know your ancestry, or where you come from. Many have mapped out their family tree and there exists a plethora of sites on the web to aid in one's endeavor. That said, I imagine few people have taken the time to map out their academic lineage. For those who've completed some amount of postgraduate education and work, fortunately there's a website that allows the user to do just that.
There are a few options out there, but one that I like is academictree.org. It's a simple interface and though I'm only interested in chemistry (well, I'm interested in many things, but for the sake of academic genealogy), they keep a database of a number of academic fields. If you find that you or someone you're not looking for isn't in the tree yet, it's easy to make additions. So, all you chemists out there--fill out that tree!
Taking a look at my lineage, you can see that I'm only 3 generations removed from one and only Robert Woodward. I'd like to think that my analytical and chemistry skills are in some way influenced by R.B.W.'s impact on my academic forebears. My Ph.D. advisor, Yoshi Kobayashi, certainly was strongly influenced by his Ph.D. advisor, Tohru Fukuyama, and instilled a similar work ethic in us, his graduate students. Yoshi also spent time as a postdoc in Yoshito Kishi's lab at Harvard, so really, my chemistry training has a sort of "East meets West" flavor to it.
Link to my tree
