Mathematics family tree

• Autor(a) principal: Nascimento, Marcio Luis Ferreira
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Outros Autores: Barco, Luiz
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFBA
• Texto Completo: http://repositorio.ufba.br/ri/handle/ri/18964
• topic: Matemática; Genealogia; Crescimento exponencial; Religião

We present a simple reasoning that explains brotherhood or fraternity in terms of an exponential growth called ?genealogy paradox?. Looking for a family tree today, the mathematics about the calculation of how many descendents were since the beginning of our Era shows that we should expect as many 604 sextilion people in the past. This occurs because a person?s ancestor tree should be a binary tree in theory, formed by the person, the first generation back with two parents, the second generation back with four grandparents, the third generation back with eight great-grandparents, and so on. Thus, there appears to be more ancestors in these early generations than people available. This astronomical number is absurd, and one explanation is related to marriages between relatives ? other reason could be related to migration. In conclusion, it is easy to observe that we are all members of a same family tree, the tree of life