The fine folks down at Florida State’s Meteorology program have put together a number of “academic family trees”.  These are like normal, hereditary family trees except without your weird uncle.  These trees link academics with their advisor (up the tree) and their students (down the tree).  You can find the project here: http://moe.met.fsu.edu/familytree/ . There are a number of things that struck me (and forgive me if these things are written down elsewhere).  First, in the ‘All’ tree there are two distinct branches before 1900 despite both branches being composed of Germanic academics.  Second, it’s amazing the number of folks toward the end of the last century with a profound impact.  Lance Bosart almost single handedly populated the far left side of the tree.  Herbert Riehl, who founded my graduate program at CSU, effectively split the tree after WWII.  He invented tropical meteorology and his branches have been pushing out from the middle ever since.  If you take a look at the Cloud Physics tree and find me or Adele and begin to trace upward, you’ll quickly land on the Bill Cotton branch before heading further up.  If you make it all the way up to one of the (current) tops of our line, you’ll find German physicist Georg Christoph Licthenber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Christoph_Lichtenberg .  Adele’s professional middle name is Lichtenberger.  It turns out Adele and I are academically related to Adele’s actual (many times removed) cousin.  How cool is that?