OC via Open Culture:

‘Back in 1975, Jack H. Het her ing ton, a physics pro fes sor at Michi gan State Uni ver si ty, wrote a research paper on low–temperature physics for the respect ed sci en tif ic jour nal Phys i cal Review Let ters. Before send ing it off, Het her ing ton asked a col league to review the paper, just to make sure it cov ered the right bases. What hap pened next Het her ing ton explained in the 1982 book, More Ran dom Walks in Sci ence:

Before I sub mit ted [the arti cle], I asked a col league to read it over and he said, ‘It’s a fine paper, but they’ll send it right back.’ He explained that that is because of the Edi tor’s rule that the word “we” should not be used in a paper with only a sin gle author. Chang ing the paper to the imper son al seemed too dif fi cult now, and it was all writ ten and typed; there fore, after an evening’s thought, I sim ply asked the sec re tary to change the title page to include the name of the fam i ly cat, a Siamese called Chester, sired one sum mer by Willard (one of the few unfixed male Siamese cats in Aspen, Col orado). I added the ini tials F D in front of the name to stand for Felix Domes ti cus and thus cre at ed F D C Willard….’