I was todays years old, when I found out that Lisa Su (CEO of AMD) and Jensen Huang (co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA) are relatives!
If you can't do a merge, it's good to have family onboard ;-)
They didn't know about their relation until much later, but if they had Jensen would have been the "cousin you don't want to be like" - he went to Oregon State and worked at a Denny's while Lisa Su went to Bronx Science and on to MIT.
> he went to Oregon State and worked at a Denny's while Lisa Su went to Bronx Science and on to MIT.
Seems like a bad vibe to imply someone shouldn't aspire to go to state school or work a humble job for money to get through it, even though given both options, indeed they may dream about the fancy one. Denny's has the best milkshakes anyway and state school is probably a much more sensible place to attend.
Although he did graduate high school two years early, so he had the intuition. Maybe his parents thought working food service for a bit was a rite of passage.
Hm, if he graduated early perhaps I can't use him as a positive example to stop me from killing myself. I guess I need to read his early-years biography.
I have to take this comment at face value. Contact NIMH[1] or your local equivalent.
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I'd check your numbers on that from 30 years ago. They weren't even in the same universe of selectivity as they are now. Full-time/part-time is totally irrelevant. What, are you the most elitist credentialist of all time lol? Jesus.
It's relevant - some companies have seats effectively reserved for them at good grad schools for masters programs for their employees, even today at less prestigious companies like Carrier and GE - the selectivity isn't based on who won beauty pageants or had 7 first author NeurIPS papers like it is for typical MBA and PhD programs at the same institutions.
Getting a Stanford MS while working was somewhat normal then (possible for mere mortals and not superhumans) if you worked at the right company, not really the same as getting into undergrad at all.
(-; Indeed always warming to the core to see productive emulation between parallel lines! I'm sure after all their achievements, neither of them wastes time pondering woulda, shoulda, cuda…
That means they're descendent of arguably the most powerful woman in the world's history, Eleanor the Aquitaine [1].
She's married to both King of France and King of England, and mother of three kings during her lifetime including King John Lackland Plantagenet (progenitor of all 43 US presidents except one).
This takes a new meaning to the popular idiom "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree".
In a grand scale of scheme the losers do not really matter, for example imagine that the most successful VC today does have countless failed ventures but if 99% of fortune top 100 of US companies the particular VC has invested in their early startup days, I can say that's much better return than Berkshire Hathaway of Warren Buffet (and BH is not a VC company).
I disagree - there are two independent systems at play here - human success, and evolutionary success.
It's unlikely that there are many ancestors of Eleanor of Aquitaine that achieved more human success than George Washington. However, George left this world with zero descendants and his line effectively ended with him. Whereas I'm sure there are a bunch of duds out there who are the same relation to Eleanor of Aquitaine and produced 9 children who each produced a handful of children.
And we are always being reminded that human is well within evolutionary paradigm, are we not?
I think there's very much underestimation that the so called modern world is more civilized and successful in their worldly endeavours compared to the earlier generations. It's probable that for Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alexander the Great and/or Aristotle are the ancestors. Comparing George Washington against Alexander and Aristotle, I'd say there is no contest for the former.
The bottom of that link has a video that is far more meaningful[0]
It asks the question if the presidents are more related to one another than to another random group. The answer to this is no.
This is probably pretty obvious if you actually look at population sizes through time[1]. There's 8 billion people alive today, but we have a billion less in 2010, 1999, (5) 1986, 1974, 1960, 1927, 1800. So in the last 100 years we grew 6 billion people! But in the last 200 years only 7 billion. In 1200 (approximately the time of King John) there was 360 million people in the world. Which is like taking the entire US and distributing across the globe. For reference, there were only 68 million people in Europe[2], which is about the current population of the UK[3] or about the combined population of Tokyo and Delhi (add Shanghai and Sao Paulo if you require city proper).
So you can probably just guess through how quickly population exploded that you're going to have convergent family trees without going back very far. Honestly, I'm more surprised it takes 800 years and not less.
A relative from 800 years ago doesn't honestly seem that impressive. That's ~30 generations? That's a whole lot of people. Good luck finding a venue large enough for that family reunion.
Agreed—all that it really shows is that all of them but Van Buren have some form of British ancestry. Even the fact that they're all descended from a King of England isn't especially noteworthy at those kinds of time scales.
That said, what's incredibly impressive, if true, is that someone managed to track each of their geneologies that far back along that line. That's not an easy feat. And this isn't just an internet legend: at the very least there really was a girl who really did put together a chart, and she got taken seriously enough to have it included in a Library of Congress exhibit on the Magna Carta [0].
I'd be interested to see the actual chart she made. One possible explanation for how she was able to do this is if each of the presidents connects up to English aristocracy fairly recently, which would account for the records being intact and would be more interesting than just the fact of a shared ancestor in ~1200.
> I'd be interested to see the actual chart she made. One possible explanation for how she was able to do this is if each of the presidents connects up to English aristocracy fairly recently, which would account for the records being intact and would be more interesting than just the fact of a shared ancestor in ~1200.
Obama's most recent aristocratic ancestor appears to be a "Sir Henry Bold" his 16x great-grandfather.
A quick look at some of the genealogies makes it appear that many rely on the same source, which lists 900 royal descendants that immigrated to the new world[1].
With 900 of them several generations back, it wouldn't be too surprising that many politicians would be related.
Oh, it's certainly an impressive feat. I too would like to see the chart she made.
> One possible explanation for how she was able to do this is if each of the presidents connects up to English aristocracy fairly recently
That would honestly be a more interesting finding personally, discovering that all of America's greatest political leader are just imported British aristocracy.
It’s more meaningful than you might think because the majority of people on earth probably aren’t decedents of this guy. Especially in the 1700’s when our first presidents where born.
Essentially zero US presidents are Asian, Hispanic, etc. Pick a Native American from 30 generations ago and you don’t see this kind of family tree. It’s an expanded circle of privilege through time.
"In 2004 mathematical modeling and computer simulations ... indicated that our most recent common ancestor probably lived no earlier than 1400 B.C.and possibly as recently as A.D. 55. "
Sure, but that's probably still just sample bias of presidents all being at least mostly anglo-saxon. Probably everyone on the British Isles is related to King John.
Seems unlikely in the 1700’s we’re talking ~20 generations and a population of 8+ million. It’s more believable if we are talking genetics, but ancestry.com is working off of official records.
It's certainly a point, but I don't think "the US presidents are white guys" is going to win any awards for research or journalism. Even Obama, famously the first black president, has a family history of white guys.
Today most white people are descends of that guy, but go back to 1732 when George Washington was born and you’re looking at a much tighter family tree.
There were several US presidents who had modest beginnings. I think this is more a consequence of exponential growth. 2**30 is ~1 billion ancestors, so by the pigeonhole principle and some fairly weak assumptions on mixing, you can count nearly every member of your ethnic group from that time as a distant ancestor. I think this girl landed on Plantagenet mostly because he would have a well-documented lineage compared to your average serf.
~2^30 describes the situation today, not in the 1700’s. ~2^20 would only be a million or so people at the time this country was founded.
Give it another 250 years and we’ll probably have a largely Asian president that’s also a descendant. IE: It’s an expanding circle of political elites combined with an expanding circle of descendants.
