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I hope this question is not inappropriate for this site; I found hsm.stackexchange better suited for it than MathOverflow or math.stackexchange. The motivation for it is just curiosity.

Question: Which mathematical papers have been co-authored by people who were / are direct blood relatives (i.e. supposedly in most cases: siblings, or parent and child)?

Everyone knows the Bernoullis (among the famous ones of which there were also uncle-nephew and cousin relations), but I'm looking for more, and more contemporary, examples.

More generally, I would be interested in family collaboration, but I ask specifically for co-authored papers because that's the most obvious way to make the notion rigorous.

Also, I exclude collaboration between partners, spouses, married couples etc. on purpose, partly because I assume that list would be longer, and partly because such relations have (sometimes vague) start (or end) points in time, allowing discussion about whether a collaboration happened while the relationship existed or not; unless of course there might be an example where e.g. a parenting couple published something together with a child of theirs.

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    $\begingroup$ A family collaboration: Lionel and Roger Penrose published Impossible Objects, the famous "Tribar" but it is not strictly mathematical. $\endgroup$
    – sand1
    Commented Feb 22, 2019 at 19:47
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    $\begingroup$ Actually, I was wondering about Janos Bolyai whose father (Farkas) tried to keep him off from working on the parallel postulate - is this a collaboration? Ultimately it was published as an appendix to a textbook by Farkas Bolyai.. $\endgroup$
    – sand1
    Commented Feb 22, 2019 at 22:00
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    $\begingroup$ Tangentially related: Hetherington co-authored a paper with his cat FCC Willard. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard I am not sure if you would consider it family but if you don't you might hurt some people's feelings :P $\endgroup$
    – ACat
    Commented Mar 17, 2019 at 2:15
  • $\begingroup$ I recently learned of the non-mathematical example of astronomers Harold D. Babcock (father) and Horace W. Babcock (son), who co-authored several papers (sometimes with more people), especially about the sun. $\endgroup$
    – Torsten Schoeneberg
    Commented Jan 22, 2023 at 18:27
  • $\begingroup$ not an answer, but Jack Hetherington is published with F. D. C. Willard and I hear that they were "like family" :-) $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Mar 24, 2023 at 3:10

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Check out these mathematicians: A father, and two sons, all of whom co-authored papers in various combinations.

David Borwein, father

Peter Borwein, son

Jonathan Borwein, son

Peter's memorial to his brother Jonahan, in which he speaks of writing papers together with his brother.

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  • $\begingroup$ +1 Darn, I definitely should have remembered them, as I have quite a few papers by these guys! $\endgroup$
    – Dave L Renfro
    Commented Feb 22, 2019 at 21:39
  • $\begingroup$ I don't know how I forgot them. $\endgroup$
    – José Carlos Santos
    Commented Feb 23, 2019 at 0:07
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Elie and Henri Cartan (father and son) published a paper together, in 1931 (Les transformations des domaines cerclés bornés).

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Arthur Leonard Rubin co-authored at least two papers with his mother, Jean Estelle Hirsh Rubin, the first one below when he was 13 years old.

Arthur L. Rubin and Jean E. Rubin, Extended operations and relations on the class of ordinal numbers, Fundamenta Mathematicae 69 #2 (1969), 227-242.

Paul Howard, Arthur L. Rubin, and Jean E. Rubin, Kinna-Wagner selection principles, axioms of choice and multiple choice, Monatshefte für Mathematik 123 #4 (December 1997), 309-319.

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Brothers Marcel and Frigyes Riesz have a joint paper,

Brothers Rolf and Frithiof Nevanlinna have 6 joint papers.

Brothers Alexander and Alexei Zamolodchikov have 8 joint papers.

Brothers David and Gregory Chudnovsky have 80 joint papers.

This list can be made very long.

Father-son collaborations are not so frequent but Herman Weyl has a paper and a book written jointly with his son Joachim.

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  • $\begingroup$ Yes, "the F & M Riesz theorem" is quite well known. $\endgroup$
    – Gerald Edgar
    Commented May 9, 2019 at 12:47
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Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, and two other chemists, co-authored this 1980 paper on iridium levels at the K/T boundary. The Alvarezes conjectured the now widely accepted impact hypothesis explaining that extinction event.

Another example: Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers co-developed MBTI (I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether that is science).

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Greg Kuperberg, mathematician and son of the couple of mathematicians Wlodymierz and Krystina Kuperberg, published, separately, a paper with his father on geometric combinatorics, at the very start of his career (1990) and later on a relevant paper (Annals of Math - 1996) on counterxamples to the Seifert conjecture with his mother. Later on he published yet another paper with his father and a third coauthor.

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Richard K. Guy - well known for work in recreational mathematics, and son Michael J. T. Guy - computer scientist and mathematician, co-published the paper "On rational Morley triangles" in Acta Arithmetica.

Authors: Bremner, Andrew; Goggins, Joseph R.; Guy, Michael J. T.; Guy, R. K. (2000).

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Ken Ono published a paper with his father Takashi Ono in 1996: ``Quadratic forms and elliptic curves, III'' in Proc. Japan Acad. Ser. A Math. Sci. 72 (1996), no. 9, 204–205.

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There are four Polish brothers ( Ryszard, Pawel, Michal and Karol Horodecki) all working in quantum information science, and they have several common papers.

Their most cited paper (with $>5000$ Google Scholar citations at the time of writing) is

Horodecki, R., Horodecki, P., Horodecki, M., & Horodecki, K. (2009). Quantum entanglement. Reviews of modern physics, 81(2), 865.

This one (without brother Karol)

Horodecki, Michał, Paweł Horodecki, and Ryszard Horodecki. "Separability of n-particle mixed states: necessary and sufficient conditions in terms of linear maps." Physics Letters A 283.1-2 (2001): 1-7.

has collected a little under 4000 Google citations at the time of writing.

They also all work at Gdańsk University.

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    $\begingroup$ Ha I remember seeing references like this in quantum information and being struck by them $\endgroup$
    – Hollis Williams
    Commented Mar 31, 2020 at 2:20
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    $\begingroup$ @Tom they are very well known for truly pioneering work in that field. $\endgroup$
    – ZeroTheHero
    Commented Mar 31, 2020 at 2:21
  • $\begingroup$ Quantum information theory per se is not something that really interests me, I just mention that I have glanced at bibliographies in the area and noticed this. I do not know who the pioneers and 'big players' in the field are. $\endgroup$
    – Hollis Williams
    Commented Mar 31, 2020 at 2:26
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I am aware that this is a physics answer rather than mathematics, but in science probably the most famous example is William Bragg and son Lawrence Bragg who did pioneering experimental work with X-rays. They are so far the only father-son team to win a Nobel Prize and Lawrence remains the youngest person to ever win a Nobel Prize in Physics, being aged only 25.

I was also going to mention the Kuperbergs, but I have seen someone else has already mentioned them.

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I found this

Boas, H. P.; Boas, R. P., "Short proofs of three theorems on harmonic functions". Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 102 (1988) 906–908.

by Ralph Boas and his son Harold Boas.

I tried and failed to find (in MathSciNet) joint papers by:
Harald Bohr and Niels Bohr (brothers)
S. L. Synge and Cathleen Morawetz (father and daughter)

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I don't know if you can be interested also in papers about philosophy of mathematics.

There are some writings by the famous French mathematician André Weil and his famous philosopher sister Simone Weil about mathematics.

They are part of the correspondence between André and Simone. They have been gathered in Simone Weil, André Weil, L’arte della matematica, Adelphi, 2018 ('The Art of Mathematics'), an Italian translation. The original title, in French, is Correspondance familiale, Gallimard, 2012.

I didn't find an English translation.

«As you have time, also too much time» Simone Weil writes at the beginning of February 1940 to her beloved brother, imprisoned in the civil prison of Le Havre for draft evasion (André thought that his duty was «to do mathematics, not war»), «another good occupation could be to think about a way to show to a layman like me what consists of the interest and the scope of your work". [...] André who, at first, had answered : «It will be as explaining a symphony to a deaf», […]ends up accepting. So, an exchange full of intellectual passion and affection begins – which leads them also to clash over capital points, as the discovery of incommensurables and the nature of Greek science. And sister and brother are capable of talking about Pythagoras and the Odyssey, of cardinals skillful in Court strategies, and about the importance of Sanskrit , of Dedekind and Gauss…

( back cover of L'arte della matematica, my translation from Italian)

An English translation of a letter of André to Simon Weil is Weil, André, 'Letter of 1940 to Simone Weil, Notices of the American Mathematical Society , 52, 3, pp. 345-341

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  • $\begingroup$ Part of the Weil's story includes the nonfamilial collective of mathematicians known as Nicolas Bourbaki en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki "At the time of Bourbaki's founding, René de Possel and his wife Eveline were in the process of divorcing. Eveline remarried to André Weil in 1937." The history of Bourbaki includes co-founder Szolem Mandelbrojt and his nephew Benoit Mandelbrot, although they never co-authored anything. $\endgroup$
    – DJohnson
    Commented Jun 28, 2023 at 18:09
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Arto Salomaa and his son Kai Salomaa both work in theoretical computer science. They have several joint research papers. An notable example is the following:

Tao Jiang, Arto Salomaa, Kai Salomaa, Sheng Yu: Decision Problems for Patterns. Journal of Computer and System Sciences 50(1): 53-63 (1995)

Marcin and Michał Philipczuk are brothers. They work together very often - and their dblp records already show more than 100 joint publications. To give an example:

Marek Cygan, Daniel Lokshtanov, Marcin Pilipczuk, Michał Pilipczuk, and Saket Saurabh: Minimum Bisection Is Fixed-Parameter Tractable. SIAM Journal on Computíng, 48(2), 417–450.

(I assume that theoretical computer science papers qualify as mathematical papers, since they contain mathematical theorems and rigorous proofs.)

The computer scientists Dorothea Blostein and Lippold Haken are children of Wolfgang Haken. According to Blostein's Wikipedia entry, "while she was an undergraduate student she helped check her father's proof of the four color theorem." Less mathematically, the two siblings Dorothea and Lippold wrote several joint papers on computer music, for example:

Dorothea Blostein, Lippold Haken: The Lime Music Editor: a Diagram Editor Involving Complex Transformations. Software - Practice and Experience 24(3): 289-306 (1994)

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Edward Witten published a paper with his father Louis Witten in 1987: ``Large radius expansion of superstring compactifications'' in Nuclear Physics B (1987), Volume 281, 109–126.

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Whilst researching Noethers theorems I noticed that an early case of the Noethers first theorem was proven by the Cosserat brothers in 1909 in a paper titled, Theorie des corps deformables. To give them their proper names, they were Eugene & Francois Cosserat. One was a mathematician, and the other, an engineer.

As the paper hints at, they were known for their work in elasticity, and which in modern terms would now be phrased via the theory of fibre bundles, or more precisely, G-bundles.

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Paper by Vladimir Dokchitser and Tim Dokchitser is an example:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.04094

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Lajos Soukup (father) and Dániel Tamás Soukup (son) have written 4 joint research papers in mathematics (according to MathSciNet).

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