G. W. Peck is a
pseudonym
A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true meaning ( orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individual's o ...
ous attribution used as the author or co-author of a number of published
academic paper
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes Research, academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or Thesis, theses. The part of academic written output that is n ...
s in
mathematics
Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...
. Peck is sometimes humorously identified with
George Wilbur Peck, a former governor of the
US state of
Wisconsin
Wisconsin ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Great Lakes region, Great Lakes region of the Upper Midwest of the United States. It borders Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michig ...
.
[.]
Peck first appeared as the official author of a 1979 paper entitled "Maximum
antichain
In mathematics, in the area of order theory, an antichain is a subset of a partially ordered set such that any two distinct elements in the subset are incomparable.
The size of the largest antichain in a partially ordered set is known as its wid ...
s of rectangular arrays". The name "G. W. Peck" is derived from the initials of the actual writers of this paper:
Ronald Graham
Ronald Lewis Graham (October 31, 1935July 6, 2020) was an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He ...
,
Douglas West,
George B. Purdy,
Paul Erdős
Paul Erdős ( ; 26March 191320September 1996) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, g ...
,
Fan Chung, and
Daniel Kleitman
Daniel J. Kleitman (born October 4, 1934)article availableon Douglas West (mathematician), Douglas West's web page, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign)."Kleitman, Daniel J.," in: ''Who's Who in Frontier Science and Technology'', 1, 1984, ...
. The paper initially listed Peck's affiliation as
Xanadu, but the editor of the journal objected, so Ron Graham gave him a job at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...
. Since then, Peck's name has appeared on some sixteen publications, primarily as a pseudonym of Daniel Kleitman.
In reference to "G. W. Peck",
Richard P. Stanley defined a Peck poset to be a
graded partially ordered set
In mathematics, especially order theory, a partial order on a Set (mathematics), set is an arrangement such that, for certain pairs of elements, one precedes the other. The word ''partial'' is used to indicate that not every pair of elements need ...
that is
rank symmetric,
rank unimodal, and
strongly Sperner.
[.] The
poset
In mathematics, especially order theory, a partial order on a Set (mathematics), set is an arrangement such that, for certain pairs of elements, one precedes the other. The word ''partial'' is used to indicate that not every pair of elements need ...
s in the original paper by G. W. Peck are not quite Peck posets, as they lack the property of being rank symmetric.
See also
*
Nicolas Bourbaki
Nicolas Bourbaki () is the collective pseudonym of a group of mathematicians, predominantly French alumni of the École normale supérieure (Paris), École normale supérieure (ENS). Founded in 1934–1935, the Bourbaki group originally intende ...
*
Arthur Besse
*
John Rainwater
The fictitious mathematician John Rainwater was created as a student prank but has become known as the author of important results in functional analysis.
At the University of Washington in 1952, John Rainwater was invented and enrolled in a mat ...
*
Blanche Descartes
Blanche Descartes was a collaborative pseudonym used by the English people, English mathematicians R. Leonard Brooks, Arthur Harold Stone, Cedric Smith (statistician), Cedric Smith, and W. T. Tutte. The four mathematicians met in 1935 as undergradu ...
*
Monsieur LeBlanc
References
External links
Imaginary Erdős numbers Numberphile, Nov 26, 2014. Video interview with Ron Graham in which he tells the story of G. W. Peck.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Peck, G. W.
Academic shared pseudonyms
American mathematicians
Pseudonymous mathematicians