Luís A. Nunes Amaral

The role of mentorship in protege performance is a matter of importance to academic, business and governmental organizations. Although the benefits of mentorship for proteges, mentors and their organizations are apparent, the extent to which proteges mimic their mentors’ career choices and acquire their mentorship skills is unclear. The importance of a science, technology, engineering and mathematics workforce to economic growth and the role of effective mentorship in maintaining a ‘healthy’ such workforce demand the study of the role of mentorship in academia. Here we investigate one aspect of mentor emulation by studying mentorship fecundity—the number of proteges a mentor trains—using data from the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which tracks the mentorship record of thousands of mathematicians over several centuries. We demonstrate that fecundity among academic mathematicians is correlated with other measures of academic success. We also find that the average fecundity of mentors remains stable over 60 years of recorded mentorship. We further discover three significant correlations in mentorship fecundity. First, mentors with low mentorship fecundities train proteges that go on to have mentorship fecundities 37% higher than expected. Second, in the first third of their careers, mentors with high fecundities train proteges that go on to have fecundities 29% higher than expected. Finally, in the last third of their careers, mentors with high fecundities train proteges that go on to have fecundities 31% lower than expected.