Institutions and the transmission of upper-tail human capital: scientific lineages across a millennium
Fuente:
arXiv
Gespeichert in:
| Hauptverfasser: | , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2026
|
| Schlagworte: | |
| Online-Zugang: | |
| Tags: |
Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
|
| _version_ | 1866910272492404736 |
|---|---|
| author | Chuma, Hiroyuki Otsuka, Kanji Sato, Yoichi |
| author_facet | Chuma, Hiroyuki Otsuka, Kanji Sato, Yoichi |
| contents | What made useful knowledge cumulative was not discovery alone but the institutions that transmitted it. We provide the first exhaustive structural measurement of the network through which upper-tail human capital passed from master to student across a millennium. Using 470,000 mentor-student records from Wikidata (which integrates the Mathematics Genealogy Project and MacTutor Archive), and all 64 historical Fields Medalists as a fixed, ex ante tracer set, backward traversal yields a directed acyclic graph of 25.5 million paths reaching 57 generations. We document two institutional transitions. First, a 17th-century watershed concentrates lineage traffic on Leibniz: 47 of 64 lineages pass through him with a 10:1 downstream-to-upstream ratio, and seven independent attributes -- learned-society membership (a 46-fold rise per scholar), field, language, employer, institutional diversification, student production, and diffusion entropy -- re-organize coherently across the same window. This is the network signature of Mokyr's Republic of Letters, and it reframes the Newton-Leibniz priority dispute as a distinction between the possession and the transmission of upper-tail human capital: it is transmission that generates the spillovers on which growth depends. Second, 84% of lineages converge upstream on five 12th-13th-century Islamic and Byzantine scholars before terminating at an 11th-century boundary -- the ``Monastery Wall'' -- at which personal academic mentorship first becomes record-generating in Europe. Our claims are descriptive-structural, not causal. Because exhaustive traversal at this scale defeats standard tools, we also contribute a deterministic, algebraic graph-traversal instrument whose measurement bias we characterize in closed form, and report one emergent property of independent methodological interest. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_31470 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Institutions and the transmission of upper-tail human capital: scientific lineages across a millennium Chuma, Hiroyuki Otsuka, Kanji Sato, Yoichi Neural and Evolutionary Computing What made useful knowledge cumulative was not discovery alone but the institutions that transmitted it. We provide the first exhaustive structural measurement of the network through which upper-tail human capital passed from master to student across a millennium. Using 470,000 mentor-student records from Wikidata (which integrates the Mathematics Genealogy Project and MacTutor Archive), and all 64 historical Fields Medalists as a fixed, ex ante tracer set, backward traversal yields a directed acyclic graph of 25.5 million paths reaching 57 generations. We document two institutional transitions. First, a 17th-century watershed concentrates lineage traffic on Leibniz: 47 of 64 lineages pass through him with a 10:1 downstream-to-upstream ratio, and seven independent attributes -- learned-society membership (a 46-fold rise per scholar), field, language, employer, institutional diversification, student production, and diffusion entropy -- re-organize coherently across the same window. This is the network signature of Mokyr's Republic of Letters, and it reframes the Newton-Leibniz priority dispute as a distinction between the possession and the transmission of upper-tail human capital: it is transmission that generates the spillovers on which growth depends. Second, 84% of lineages converge upstream on five 12th-13th-century Islamic and Byzantine scholars before terminating at an 11th-century boundary -- the ``Monastery Wall'' -- at which personal academic mentorship first becomes record-generating in Europe. Our claims are descriptive-structural, not causal. Because exhaustive traversal at this scale defeats standard tools, we also contribute a deterministic, algebraic graph-traversal instrument whose measurement bias we characterize in closed form, and report one emergent property of independent methodological interest. |
| title | Institutions and the transmission of upper-tail human capital: scientific lineages across a millennium |
| topic | Neural and Evolutionary Computing |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31470 |