G. W. Peck is a pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

ous attribution used as the author or co-author of a number of published mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 academic papers. Peck is sometimes humorously identified with George Wilbur Peck

George Wilbur Peck

George Wilbur Peck was an American writer and politician who served as the 17th Governor of Wisconsin.Peck was born in 1840 in Henderson, New York, the oldest of three children of David B. and Alzina P. Peck. In 1843, the family moved to Cold Spring, Wisconsin...

, a former governor of the US

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 state of Wisconsin

Wisconsin

Wisconsin is a U.S. state located in the north-central United States and is part of the Midwest. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michigan to the northeast, and Lake Superior to the north. Wisconsin's capital is...

.

Peck first appeared as the official author of a 1979 paper entitled "Maximum antichain

Antichain

In mathematics, in the area of order theory, an antichain is a subset of a partially ordered set such that any two elements in the subset are incomparable. Let S be a partially ordered set...

s of rectangular arrays". The name "G. W. Peck" is derived from the initials of the actual writers of this paper: Ronald Graham

Ronald Graham

Ronald Lewis Graham is a mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as being "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years"...

, Douglas West, George B. Purdy

George B. Purdy

George Barry Purdy is a mathematician and computer scientist who specializes in combinatorial geometry and number theory. He is the namesake of the Purdy polynomial used in operating systems to hash user passwords....

, Paul Erdős

Paul Erdos

Paul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician. Erdős published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory...

, Fan Chung

Fan Chung

Fan Rong K Chung Graham , known professionally as Fan Chung, is a mathematician who works mainly in the areas of spectral graph theory, extremal graph theory and random graphs, in particular...

, and Daniel Kleitman

Daniel Kleitman

Daniel J. Kleitman is a professor of applied mathematics at MIT. His research interests include combinatorics, graph theory, genomics, and operations research.- Biography :...

. 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 P. Stanley

Richard Peter Stanley is the Norman Levinson Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1971 under the supervision of Gian-Carlo Rota...

 defined a Peck poset to be a graded

Graded poset

In mathematics, in the branch of combinatorics, a graded poset, sometimes called a ranked poset , is a partially ordered set P equipped with a rank function ρ from P to N compatible with the ordering such that whenever y covers x, then...

 partially ordered set

Partially ordered set

In mathematics, especially order theory, a partially ordered set formalizes and generalizes the intuitive concept of an ordering, sequencing, or arrangement of the elements of a set. A poset consists of a set together with a binary relation that indicates that, for certain pairs of elements in the...

 that is rank symmetric, rank unimodal, and strongly Sperner. The posets in the original paper by G. W. Peck are not Peck posets, as they lack the rank symmetric property.