St. Olaf's Ahnenreihe Number

I came across reference to the Anhenreihe system today, which I previously wasn't familliar with. This system assigns a unique number to each ancestor.

The cool (to me) feature—which isn't explained in the Anhenreihe Wikipedia article—is that if you write the Anhenreihe number in binary it trivially encodes the generational relationships all the way back to the n-th ancestor.

The first digit is always a 1. It represents the child. Then, tracing backwards to the parent, then grandparents, and so forth, a 0 represents a father, and a 1 a mother.

By my calcuations, the Ahnenreihe number for my relation to St. Olaf is 23,865,465,306.

In binary that number is 10110001110011111100001100111011010, which can be then be read in English: St. Olaf is my father's mother's mother's father's father's father's mother's mother's mother's father's father's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's mother's father's father's father's father's mother's mother's father's father's mother's mother's mother's father's mother's mother's father's mother's father.

Got that?

—Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, January 31, 2005 at 20:38