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 mathematics course by graduate students who were in possession of a duplicate student-registration form.

Most notably, Nicolas Bourbaki has been the collective pseudonym for a number of leading mathematicians writing in French for many decades.

Other students in the class were made aware of the situation from the professor's enigmatic remarks after he became the victim of a novelty "exploding" fountain pen bearing Rainwater's name.

Functional analyst Robert R. Phelps wrote the third, ninth, eleventh (an unpublished note for the Rainwater seminar), twelfth, and thirteenth (with Peter D. Morris), fifteenth (with Isaac Namioka), and sixteenth (with David Preiss) papers.

[1] John Rainwater came into existence at the University of Washington in 1952 when Nick Massey, a mathematics graduate student in Prof. Maynard Arsove's beginning real variables class, erroneously received a blank registration card.

They handed in John Rainwater's homework regularly, so it wasn't until after the first midterm exam that Prof. Arsove became aware of the deception.

He took it well, even when he later opened an "exploding" fountain pen with John Rainwater's name engraved on it which had been left on the classroom table.