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For students: It is worthwhile to examine how the scientific philosophies and ideas of your field have propagated down to your professors from their mentors, and eventually to you. Here some anecdotes about some of the folks above that you might find interesting.
E. H. Moore did some of the pioneering work on mathematical axiom systems that eventually led to what we now call computability.
His student, Oswald Veblen was part of the team that built the first digital computer—the ENIAC.
Veblen's student, Alonzo Church became one of the founding fathers of functional programming. He invented the lambda calculus and co-posited the Church-Turing thesis, which many identify as the birth of computer science as a discipline.
His student, Stephen Kleene went on to develop recursion theory, regular expressions, and many other foundations of computability theory.
His student, Bob Constable, is currently a professor at Cornell and graduated the very first student from the computer science department there. His research involves automated, logic-based programming and theorem-proving.
Bob Harper, Dr. Constable's student, is a professor at Carnegie Mellon and a major figure in type theory research. He made significant contributions to the development of the Standard ML functional programming language.
Finally, his student and my Ph.D. advisor, Greg Morrisett, is now a professor at Harvard. His research is some of the earliest to apply type theory and compiler design to computer security, giving rise to the field of language-based security, which is my primary area of research.
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