Ned Birdsall´s academic ancestry

Summary form only given. I will briefly describe Ned Birdsall´s doctoral research on travelling wave tubes at Stanford, and his interaction with Lester Field, who was his official thesis advisor, and Marvin Chodorow, who was second reader of his thesis and largely took over supervising his research after Field left Stanford for a job in industry. Considering only proven official thesis advisors, Ned´s ancestry can be traced back to Edward L. Nichols, the founder of the Physical Review, who got his Ph.D. from Göttingen in 1879. If other important mentors are included in the definition of academic lineage, then Ned´s direct ancestors include Eugene Wigner and Percy Bridgman as “great grandfathers,” as well as Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Lavoisier, and even Hegel. By this expanded definition, Max Planck is a “brother” of E. L. Nichols, being a fellow student of Helmholtz and Kirchhoff, while Sigmund Freud is their first cousin on one side, and Felix Klein, a direct ancestor of Einstein, Heisenberg and Born, is their first cousin on the other side. Other direct ancestors include John Trowbridge, an early plasma physicist whose 1873 doctoral thesis at Harvard included research on the electrical conductivity of gas flames.