What if https://mathgenealogy.org , which purports to document who was bitten by whom, is a fraud? All mathematicians are actually vampires, and to cover their tracks they periodically "die" (stop publishing under a given name) and pretend to be someone else's "student" (starting publishing under a new name). This hypothesis would certainly explain the mathematicians' conceit ("recall...") that, instead of learning knowledge, we are just remembering what our souls once knew.