G. W. Peck is a
pseudonym
A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...
ous attribution used as the author or co-author of a number of published
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
academic paper
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally publ ...
s. Peck is sometimes humorously identified with
George Wilbur Peck, a former governor of the
US state of
Wisconsin
Wisconsin () is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. Wisconsin is the 25th-largest state by total area and the 20th-most populous. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake M ...
.
[.]
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,
Douglas West,
George B. Purdy
George Barry Purdy (20 February 1944 – 30 December 2017) was a mathematician and computer scientist who specialized in cryptography, combinatorial geometry, and number theory.
Purdy received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana†...
,
Paul Erdős
Paul Erdős ( hu, Erdős Pál ; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 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 ...
,
Fan Chung, and
Daniel Kleitman
Daniel J. Kleitman (born October 4, 1934)article availableon 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, p. 396. is an American mathe ...
. The paper initially listed Peck's affiliation as
Xanadu
Xanadu may refer to:
* Shangdu, the ancient summer capital of Kublai Khan's empire in China
* a metaphor for opulence or an idyllic place, based upon Coleridge's description of Shangdu in his poem ''Kubla Khan''
Other places
* Xanadu (Titan), ...
, but the editor of the journal objected, so Ron Graham gave him a job at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984),
then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996)
and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007),
is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
. 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
Richard Peter Stanley (born June 23, 1944) is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2000 to 2010, he was the Norman Levinson Professor of Applied Mathematics. He r ...
defined a Peck poset to be a
graded partially ordered set
In mathematics, especially order theory, a partially ordered set (also poset) formalizes and generalizes the intuitive concept of an ordering, sequencing, or arrangement of the elements of a Set (mathematics), set. A poset consists of a set toget ...
that is
rank symmetric
Rank is the relative position, value, worth, complexity, power, importance, authority, level, etc. of a person or object within a ranking, such as:
Level or position in a hierarchical organization
* Academic rank
* Diplomatic rank
* Hierarchy
* ...
,
rank unimodal
Rank is the relative position, value, worth, complexity, power, importance, authority, level, etc. of a person or object within a ranking, such as:
Level or position in a hierarchical organization
* Academic rank
* Diplomatic rank
* Hierarchy
* ...
, and
strongly Sperner In order-theoretic mathematics, a graded partially ordered set is said to have the Sperner property (and hence is called a Sperner poset), if no antichain within it is larger than the largest rank level (one of the sets of elements of the same ran ...
.
[.] The
posets 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 - PSL (ENS). Founded in 1934–1935, the Bourbaki group originally in ...
*
Arthur Besse Arthur Besse is a pseudonym chosen by a group of French differential geometers, led by Marcel Berger, following the model of Nicolas Bourbaki. A number of monographs have appeared under the name.
Bibliography
*
**
*Actes de la Table Ronde de Gé ...
*
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 mathematicians R. Leonard Brooks, Arthur Harold Stone, Cedric Smith, and W. T. Tutte. The four mathematicians met in 1935 as undergraduate students at Trinity College, Cambridge, ...
*
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