Pseudonyms of famous mathematicians

Question

Many mathematicians know that Lewis Carroll was quite a good mathematician, who wrote about logic (paradoxes) and determinants. He found an expansion formula, which bears his real name (Charles Lutwidge) Dodgson. Needless to say, L. Carroll was his pseudonym, used in literature.

Another (alive) mathematician writes under his real name and under a pseudonym (John B. Goode). (That person, by the way, is Bruno Poizat: it's no secret, even MathSciNet knows it.)

What other mathematicians (say dead ones) had a pseudonym, either within their mathematical activity, or in a parallel career ?

Of course, don't count people who changed name at some moment of their life because of marriage, persecution, conversion, and so on.

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Edit. The answers and comments suggest that there are at least four categories of pseudonyms, which don't exhaust all situations.

• Professional mathematicians, who did something outside of mathematics under a pseudonym (F. Hausdorff - Paul Mongré, E. Temple Bell - John Taine),
• People doing mathematics under a pseudonym, and something else under their real name (Sophie Germain - M. Le Blanc, W. S. Gosset - Student)),
• Professional mathematicians writing mathematics under both their real name and a pseudonym (B. Poizat - John B. Goode),
• Collaborative pseudonyms (Bourbaki, Blanche Descartes)

Answer 1

From Zinbiel, G.W., Encyclopedia of types of algebras 2010, Bai, Chengming (ed.) et al., Operads and universal algebra. Proceedings of the summer school and international conference, Tianjin, China, July 5--9, 2010. Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific (ISBN 978-981-4365-11-6/hbk; 978-981-4458-33-7/ebook). Nankai Series in Pure, Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics 9, 217-297 (2012). ZBL1351.17001.:

"Note that J.-L. Loday published this article under the pseudonym Guillaume William Zinbiel (Zinbiel is Leibniz written backwards)."

Answer 2

D. P. Parent is the author of a book of Exercises in Number Theory. Its authors are D. Barsky, F. Bertrandias, G. Christol, A. Decomps, H. Delange, J.-M. Deshouillers, K. Gérardin, J. Lagrange, J.-L. Nicolas, M. Pathiaux, G. Rauzy and M. Waldschmidt. The initials of the pseudonym recall the names of Delange, Pisot and Poitou, the three organizers of a Number Theory Seminar in Paris, which runs since 1959.

Answer 3

D'Alembert's name was in a sense a "pseudonym." D'Alembert was abandoned as an infant. However, d'Alembert was neither the name of his birth parents nor his adoptive parents. He made it up when he was a student.

Answer 4

In addition to being the "G" of G. W. Peck (as pointed out by Richard Stanley earlier), Ron Graham also published "On properties of a well-known graph or What is your Ramsey number?" as Tom Odda, a member of the Department of Mathematics from Xanadu University.

Apparently the name was chosen because if said quickly it sounded like the Chinese expression 他妈的 pronounced "ta ma de", a not so polite phrase in Chinese!

Answer 5

Hugo Steinhaus was also an author of aphorisms, which he published in the daily "Slowo Polskie" under a pseudonym Sestertius. Most were just goofy definitions of everyday terms. The following example seems to do OK in translation from Polish: "An opinion that all high-rank officers are stupid: a generalization". The book edition ("Slownik Racjonalny") appeared in 1980 (after his death) under his real name.

Answer 6

Boto von Querenburg wrote a book on general topology, which is one of the standard source in German. According to Wikipedia the name actually stands for the authors Gunter Bengel, Hans-Dieter Coldewey, Klaus Funcke, Edelgard Gramberg, Norbert Peczynski, Andreas Stieglitz, Elmar Vogt and Heiner Zieschang. The name Boto was chosen as an abbreviation of "Bochum topologists" and the University of Bochum is in a part of the town called Querenburg.

Answer 7

For reasons that it amuses him not to explain, Harold Simmons published the book First Steps in Modal Logic under the pseudonym Sally Popkorn.

Answer 8

Albert Gifi is a group pseudonym for a groupf of authors writing "Nonlinear Multivariate Analysis" From this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_de_Leeuw

"De Leeuw is the originator[4] of the Albert Gifi team that wrote Nonlinear Multivariate Analysis.[5] In Multidimensional Scaling, Volume 1,[6] Cox and Cox write that "Albert Gifi is the nom de plume of members, past and present, of the Department of Data Theory at the University of Leiden who devised a system of nonlinear multivariate analysis that extends various techniques, such as principal components analysis and canonical correlation analysis." "

Answer 9

It might be a stretch but Ben Franklin spent time on recreational mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square, https://www.amazon.com/Benjamin-Franklins-Numbers-Mathematical-Odyssey/dp/0691129568/, and called himself a number of pseudonyms (Richard Saunders, Mrs. Silence Dogood) in his other writings.

Answer 10

Elena Ventzel is not a very famous mathematician, although her textbook on Probability for engineers was (still is?) by far the most famous and widely used one in Russia.

She had a successful separate career as a fiction writer under a pen-name I. Grekova (derived from "igrek").

Answer 11

O. P. Lossers has published since 1965, mostly problem solutions in various journals. He has Erdös number 2.

Answer 12

T. G. L. Zetters, has proven in 1979 that either player can draw in the 8-in-a-row game. This is a variant of the well known 5-in-a-row where players take turn placing their mark to a square on an infinite square grid, and a player wins if they have a consecutive sequence of 8 or more of his own marks in a row, column, or diagonal. According to the book Csákány Béla, Diszkrét Matematikai Játékok (Polygon, Szeged, 1998), this is a pseudonim of a group of Dutch mathematicians. According to the manuscript András Csernenszky, The Chooser-Picker 7-in-a-row-game (submitted in 2010, arXiv:1004.2460v1), it is a pseudonym for A. Brouwer.

Answer 13

One may type "pseudonym" into an "Anywhere" box at MathSciNet and find 44 hits. Many of these are not relevant to the question at hand, but I'll post any that I find that haven't been posted here already. Here's one: Christian Tapp, Kardinalitat und Kardinale, MR 2006h:01012, the review by Volker Peckhaus says that in Chapter 5, "We learn about [Georg] Cantor's pseudonyms such as Vincent Regnas, Jorge Vincente Monteador de Montemor, and others...."

Answer 14

Continuing to troll through MathSciNet, I find Yu I Krivonosov, Higher mathematics and higher authority, MR 2002k:01034, reviewed by R L Cooke (and I highly recommend the review). It seems that A I Lapin, a convicted anti-Soviet agitator, confined to an asylum in Leningrad, was allowed to publish under a pseudonym in 1952.

Answer 15

Yet another find on MathSciNet. Anita Feferman, Politics, Logic, and Love, MR 93j:01010, reviewed by D J Struik. This is a biography of Jean van Heijenoort. "In 1948 he broke openly with his past in a paper of [sic] the Partisan Review, where he denied the scientific nature of Marxism. He wrote it under a pseudonym (Jean Vannier) - after all he was an alien and it was the McCarthy period."

Answer 16

Here's one more from MathSciNet. N Ya Vilenkin, Formulas on cardboard, MR 93a:01039, reviewed by B Rosenfeld. Nikolay S Koshlyakov was arrested in 1942, was denounced as an "enemy of the nation," and was condemned to ten years in the camps. The book written by him in the camp, Investigations of a class of transcendental functions determined by the generalized equation of Riemann, was published ... in 1949 ... under the pseudonym N S Sergeev (Koshlyakov's patronymic name was Sergeevich).

Answer 17

Heinrich Seidel's review of M Lothaire, Combinatorics on Words, MR 84g:05002, says "The name of the author is a pseudonym chosen by the mathematicians who together with D Perrin serve as coauthors." There are about a dozen coauthors.

Answer 18

P. A. Batnik was a pseudonym used by Paul T. Bateman and Bruce Reznick for contributions to the American Math Monthly's problems column. See, e.g., http://celebratio.org/Bateman_PT/article/332/

Answer 19

Gergonne has published 43 additional papers anonymously or under a pseudonym in his Annales des Mathématiques pure et appliquée (1810–1831). In his copy of the journal given to the Sorbonne library, he had added his name manually to these contributions (see Henry, C., Supplément à la bibliographie de Gergonne., Bonc. Bull. 14, 211-218 (1881). JFM 13.0019.01.).

Answer 20

Peter Cameron tells the story of the collaborative pseudonym WE Opencomb in his (Peter’s) blog

https://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/collaboration-in-mathematics/

Answer 21

Jacob Goodman published the as-yet-unsolved Pancake Problem under the pseudonym, Harry Dweighter ("harried waiter"). See, e.g., https://faculty.math.illinois.edu/~west/openp/pancake.html

Answer 22

As far as I know, Horst Herrlich has some publications as Y.T. Rhineghost. http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~herrlich/public/index.html (Wayback Machine) http://www.csupomona.edu/~hlord/geist/ (Wayback Machine)

I do not know the story behind this pseudonym.

Answer 23

The mathematician Dan Barbilian was also a poet, having the pen name Ion Barbu. Some of his works are described here (Wayback Machine) and here (Wayback Machine).

Answer 24

A very common type of pseudonym, especially in the Renaissance, was a Latinisation. Examples include:

• René Descartes becomes Renatus Cartesius;
• Mikołaj Kopernik becomes Nicolaus Copernicus;
• Geert de Kremer becomes Gerardus Mercator;
• Willebrord Snel van Royen ('Snell') becomes Willebrord Snellius.

(Mathematics was not as well-established as a single profession at the time, and most of the people listed were active in many fields of science. A true Renaissance scientist is a polymath.)

Remark. For some reason, this practice seems to have been especially popular in the Low Countries. This is somewhat remarkable, given that (following Simon Stevin, another Renaissance scientist) the Dutch language dropped Latin and Greek loanwords like subtract, multiply, and even mathematics itself, in favour of the Dutch words aftrekken, vermenigvuldigen, and wiskunde. There are very few European languages that have their own word for mathematics.

Remark. One may argue that a Latinisation does not constitute a pseudonym, but if we translate pseudonym literally as false name, then any name deviating from a person's actual [legal] name can be considered a pseudonym.

Answer 25

Pytheas N. Fogg is a collective of several authors including Valérie Berthé, Sébastien Ferenczi, Christian Mauduit, Anne Siegel and others - Review of J. P. Allouche of

Pytheas Fogg, N. (ed.); Berthé, Valérie (ed.); Ferenczi, Sébastien (ed.); Mauduit, Christian (ed.); Siegel, A. (ed.), Substitutions in dynamics, arithmetics and combinatorics, Lecture Notes in Mathematics. 1794. Berlin: Springer. xv, 402 p. EUR 57.95/net; sFr. 96.50; £ 40.50; $ 76.80 (2002). ZBL1014.11015.: "This collective book, published under the pseudonym N. Pytheas Fogg, based on courses given by the authors in several universities and during several summer schools".

Answer 26

I realize now that Oscar Zariski was only a variation of his original name Ascher Zaritsky. He changed his name when publishing his dissertation, perhaps to hide his Jewish origin in the fascist Italy.

Answer 27

According to the review of Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze, Sørensen, Henrik Kragh, Louis Olivier: a mathematician only known through his publications in Crelle’s journal during the 1820s, Centaurus 48, No. 3, 201-231 (2006). ZBL1115.01012., "ventures several hypotheses, including that ‘Olivier’ was a pseudonym. From the information revealed in this article the reviewer is inclined not even to rule out that Olivier and Crelle were the same person."

Answer 28

I guess, though I am not sure, the case of Albert Wormstein falls in your third category:

Professional mathematicians writing mathematics under both their real name and a pseudonym.

This paper: "Polyominoes of order 3 do not exist" (Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A, Volume 61, Issue 1, September 1992, Pages 130–136) has been written by I. N. Stewart and A. Wormstein.

Here is the story behind the paper as told by Ian Stewart himself.

The link has the correct story. Albert Wormstein first appeared in one of my articles for Pour La Science / Scientific American, which was used as a chapter in the cited book. While I was writing that article it suddenly seemed clear that there ought to be a way to prove the conjecture about order 3 polyominoes. It felt as though Albert was tapping me on the shoulder and saying 'come on, we can do this.' It quickly turned out he was right. So I decided to give him credit as a co-author. The journal either spotted the joke and went along with it, or they assumed Albert was a PhD student. At any rate, they published it with him as co-author.

Answer 29

According to Daniel Lazard, in his review of Berenstein and Struppa, Recent improvements in the complexity of the effective nullstellensatz, MR 92m:13024, N Fitchas was a pseudonym for a working group led by J Heintz that got results on the membership problem and the representation problem.

Answer 30

Volume 1 of Statistical Methods of Model Building, edited by Helga Bunke and Olaf Bunke, was first published under the pseudonym of K M S Humak. See the review by J Kleffe, MR 88d:62121. See also MR 86b:62002.