Harry Coonce

Who is Harry Coonce?

In mathematics, Harry Bernard Coonce is an American mathematician notable for being the originator of the now-popular Mathematics Genealogy Project, launched in 1996, a web-based catalog of mathematics doctoral advisors and students.

Coonce conceived of the idea while reading the unsigned thesis of his academic advisor Malcolm Robertson, in the Princeton University library, and wondering who his advisor’s advisor was. The amount of time it took Coonce, without the existence of a central database of such information, to find out that Robertson’s advisor was C. Einar Hille, gave him the idea for the project. In a 2000 interview, Coonce estimated that the project would top out at about 80,000 entries. As of 12 July 2012, there were 162,394 entries.