On this entry I'll document what I did to generate a genealogy graph. I'm doing this after having done one for the department of pure mathematics in Sheffield whereas what I should have done is started documenting when I started doing that graph. Ah well, better late than never. This is the steps for generating the graph of an Important Mathematician.

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I'm trying to generate a decent genealogy graph for an Important Mathematician. So, first step is to download the necessary tools.

• Genealogy Graph Generator

Unfortunately, ggg doesn't come with instructions on how to install it. First attempt was just to copy everything in the src directory to somewhere on my path. My machine had GraphViz already installed but didn't have the corresponding perl module so I then had to do:

cpan GraphViz

Well, actually I had to update cpan since for some reason the primary mirror that I was using dated back to 2005 and GraphViz wouldn't install. Trying to update cpan made a huge mess and so I had to go back to a manual install. Fortunately that's fairly easy: just download the package from CPAN and run

perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/home/userid
make
make test
make install

I also had to mess around with the PERL5LIB environment variable because things ended up being installed in bizarre places. Actually, they weren't that bizarre but for some reason perl wasn't looking there. The quickest fix seemed to be to add the necessary directories to PERL5LIB. Note to self: look into this later.

With all that, my kit, as they say, seemed complete. I already had the data downloaded for the famous mathematician so I ran

ggg svg famousmathematician.agml famousmathematician.svg

to generate an svg output. A bit later I'll add in how I got that data. The point is that it includes descendants which requires a minor modification of the ggg code. Unfortunately I've lost that modification so when I need it again I'll reinvent it and add it here. Until then, it will remain a mystery.

To view this, I downloaded zgrviewer. This just needed putting somewhere reasonable to install it and editing the run.sh script (and renaming it to something a little more sensible ... like zgrviewer). This looked good.

Next question was as to whether I could install it online. I followed the instructions on the zgrviewer applet website, then had to go to the help page for getting plugins to work on Mozilla on a FreeBSD machine to get the Java™ plugin working. With almost no fiddling, that all worked just fine.

Next step was to add a little data to the original dataset. Unfortunately, the famous mathematician's supervisor is not listed as having any supervisors so here the project stalls for a short time.

Anyway, the for-now-final result can be seen here: Atiyah's genealogy graph.