Scientist Cat Names: Einstein, Curie & a Cat Who Co-Authored a Physics Paper

In 1975, the journal Physical Review Letters published a study of helium atoms titled “Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc ³He.” It carried two authors. One was the Michigan State physicist Jack H. Hetherington. The other, listed as F.D.C. Willard, was his cat. Hetherington had written the paper using the royal “we” throughout, a colleague warned him the journal rejected single-author papers that used the plural, and rather than retype the whole manuscript he simply invented a co-author. The initials stood for Felis Domesticus, Chester, Willard — the cat’s species, his name, and his father’s name. The paper was published on November 24, 1975, and is real, peer-reviewed, and still cited. Willard later “signed” a second paper alone, and the hoax became a beloved piece of physics folklore. You can read about the cat himself on our profile of F.D.C. Willard.

That story sets the tone for this whole collection. Science is full of cats — some imaginary, some painted into the margins of history — and its great names make sharp, citation-worthy choices for a cat who is clearly running experiments of her own. There is a practical bonus too: many of these names carry built-in meaning. An element name describes a coat color, an astronomer’s name suits a black cat with starry flecks, and a quantum term lets you call “Quark!” across the yard without explaining yourself. Below, every linked name has its own dictionary entry; the surnames we could not link (Curie, Tesla, Turing, and a few others) stay unlinked with a one-line gloss naming who they honor, and the dates and facts here were checked against published sources.

Physics and the cosmos

Start with the discipline that gave us the most famous cat of all. In 1935 Erwin Schrödinger described a thought experiment — a cat sealed in a box with a flask of poison triggered by a single decaying atom — to expose how strange quantum superposition becomes at everyday scale. He never owned that cat; it was a paradox, not a pet. Fittingly, both Schrodinger and our profile of the imaginary Schrödinger live in this site. It fits a cat who manages to be asleep, awake, and loudly demanding food all at once until you actually look in the box.

• The giants: Einstein for relativity, Newton for gravity and motion, Galileo for the telescope. Newton attracts his own cat lore: a long-repeated story credits him with inventing the cat flap at Trinity College, supposedly cutting a big hole for his cat and a smaller one for her kittens. Treat it as legend — the tale first appeared in print in 1827, a century after his death, and his biographers note he kept no cat in his rooms.
• The quantum crowd: Pauli for the exclusion principle and Fermi, who built the first nuclear reactor. Bohr — the Danish architect of the atom — and Planck — founder of quantum theory — stay as text.
• Electricity and fields: Faraday for electromagnetic induction, Maxwell for the equations that bind light and magnetism, and Kelvin for the absolute temperature scale. Tesla — pioneer of alternating current — and Volta — inventor of the battery — remain unlinked.
• The inventor: Edison, and Bell for the telephone. For a cat with a fast, crackling temperament, the pure energy words fit too: Spark, Bolt, and Flash.

Chemistry and the elements

A periodic-table name doubles as a coat description, which makes this category unusually practical. The classic honor here is Marie Curie — twice a Nobel laureate, in physics and chemistry — whose surname stays as text; pair it with her daughter and husband below.

• Chemists: Dalton for atomic theory and Bunsen for the burner that bears his name. Mendeleev — who arranged the periodic table — Lavoisier — father of modern chemistry — and Pauling — two-time Nobel winner — stay as text.
• Metals for a coat: Copper and Rusty for warm reds, Silver and Nickel for cool grays, Iron and Cobalt for deep blue-grays, Mercury for liquid shine.
• Noble gases: Neon, Argon, and Krypton — inert, glowing, and quietly elegant.
• Light elements: Carbon for a sleek black coat and Zinc for a silvery one.
• Lab gear: for a cat who patrols the kitchen counter, Beaker, Crystal, or Chrome.

Naturalists and life science

This branch produced people who watched animals patiently for decades, which feels right for naming a cat. The flagship is Darwin, whose 1859 work on natural selection reframed all of biology. Beside him stands Wallace — Alfred Russel Wallace independently arrived at natural selection and shares credit for the 1858 joint announcement.

• Founders: Linnaeus — who created the system of Latin binomial names — and Mendel — the monk whose pea plants founded genetics — both stay as text.
• The microscope set: Pasteur — germ theory and the rabies vaccine — stays as text. Hooke — who coined the word “cell” after looking at cork through a microscope — also remains unlinked.
• Coat-color naturalist picks: a tabby honoring the striped patterns Darwin studied works as Tabby or Tawny; a marmalade cat as Marmalade or Honey.
• Field observers: Audubon, the painter-naturalist of American birds. Jane Goodall — who transformed how we study chimpanzees — stays as text. A note of caution worth weighing: cats are formidable hunters of the very birds Audubon painted, which is one small argument for keeping a curious cat indoors.

Mathematics and computing

A computing name is a sly nod to a cat’s talent for sitting on warm keyboards. The headline choice is Ada, for Ada Lovelace, who in the 1840s wrote what many historians call the earliest computer program for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine — and his surname is here too, as Babbage.

• Ancients: Archimedes for the lever and buoyancy, Euclid for geometry. Pythagoras and Hypatia — the Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer — stay as text.
• Builders of modern math: Pascal, who built an early calculating machine. Gauss, Euler, and Fibonacci — giants of number theory and sequences — remain unlinked.
• Computing pioneers: Hopper, for Grace Hopper, the U.S. Navy rear admiral who helped develop early programming languages and whose team famously logged an actual moth stuck in a relay — a real “bug.” Turing — founder of theoretical computer science — stays as text. Try the abstract Genius, Matrix, Vector, or the constant Pi. Greek-letter names suit a litter you want to number: Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma, Sigma, and Omega.

Astronomers and stargazers

Stargazers give you a name that works on a black cat with white speckles as neatly as it does on history. Copernicus moved the sun to the center; Kepler worked out that planets travel in ellipses; Tycho, for Tycho Brahe, gathered the precise naked-eye observations that made Kepler’s work possible.

• Named after them in the sky: Halley, whose comet returns roughly every 76 years and was last seen in 1986, and Hubble, for both the orbiting telescope and the astronomer who showed the universe is expanding. For a cat with a literal celestial streak, Comet, Stardust, and Halo fit neatly.
• The communicators: Sagan, for Carl Sagan, who brought the cosmos to a television generation. Ptolemy mapped the older Earth-centered sky.
• Space-age words: Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, launched in 1957; Apollo, the program that reached the Moon; and the cosmic trio Cosmo, Galaxy, and Orbit.
• Pure sky words: Sirius, the brightest night star, plus Vega, Polaris, Rigel, and Antares.
• Galileo and his moons: Galileo turned a telescope on Jupiter in 1610 and found four points of light circling it, the bodies we now call the Galilean moons. They make a ready-made litter for four kittens: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto — the last named for a nymph whom myth turns into a bear and sets among the stars.

Women who changed science

Several of the field’s sharpest stories belong to women, and their names carry real weight. Marie Curie — the only person ever honored with Nobel Prizes in two separate sciences — anchors the group as text; her first name Marie is linkable here. Pair it with Rosalind, for Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA — especially the famous “Photo 51” — were central to the double-helix discovery, though she died in 1958 before the Nobel was awarded for that work. These names reward a cat with quiet, watchful intelligence.

• Inventor in disguise: Hedy, for Hedy Lamarr, who with composer George Antheil received U.S. Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 for a frequency-hopping system — an idea that later underpinned Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
• Physicists and astronomers: Lise, for Lise Meitner, who helped explain nuclear fission, and Caroline, for Caroline Herschel, the first woman paid as a professional astronomer.
• For the curious: Grace (Hopper again), Sally (Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, in 1983), and Mary (Mary Somerville, whose 1834 book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences prompted William Whewell to coin the word “scientist” in his review of it).
• The astronomer: Caroline Herschel discovered eight comets, and in 1787 King George III granted her a salary — the first woman in Britain known to be paid for scientific work.

A coat for every kind of genius

Science names map onto fur with unusual precision. Use the discipline to read the cat in front of the camera flash.

• Solid black: Onyx, Carbon, or Coal — or go cosmic with the dark-matter mood of Nebula and Eclipse.
• Ginger and orange: Spark and Bolt for an electric streak, Ember and Ginger for a warm glow, Marmalade for a tabby.
• Gray and silver: Slate, Smoke, and Silver, or the metallic Chrome.
• Calico and tortoiseshell: Calico and Tortie read like a periodic table of patches — a different element in every blotch.
• Quantum-themed for any coat: Atom, Quark, Proton, Neutron, Quantum, and the pixel-perfect Pixel.
• Warm cream and white: a pale cat suits Cream, Ivory, Pearl, or the cool-light Frost and Snow.
• Bicolor and tuxedo: a sharply two-toned cat earns Domino or Patch, while a single dark cat can be Inky or Pepper.

Bonded pairs and famous partnerships

Science runs on collaboration, so two cats can carry a real research duo between them. Honor the Curies with Marie and Pierre, the married physicists who shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics. Other historically grounded pairings:

• Sky and motion: Kepler and Tycho — the theorist and the observer whose data he inherited.
• The double helix: Franklin and a second cat named for James Watson or Francis Crick — the two surnames stay as text, but Franklin links here.
• Light and electricity: Faraday and Maxwell — the experimenter and the mathematician who turned his ideas into equations.
• Computing’s first team: Ada and Babbage — the programmer and the engine she wrote for.
• Inventors of sound and signal: Edison and Bell, rivals and contemporaries in the age of the phonograph and the telephone.

For a litter rather than a pair, lean on the elements or the Greek alphabet so the set hangs together: three kittens as Copper, Silver, and Gold — the last stays as text — or as Alpha, Beta, and Delta. A bonded brother-and-sister can wear two halves of an observation: Flash and Bolt for two ginger streaks, or Smoke and Ember for a gray cat and a red one.

Choosing yours

Pick by the kind of cat you live with. A black cat who vanishes into shadow earns Onyx or the dark-sky Nebula; a copper tabby suits Ginger or Spark; a cat with an experimental streak deserves Einstein, Ada, or Schrodinger. If you are after a name with staying power, these surnames carry centuries of story behind them, while the word names — Nova, Galaxy, Atom — stay easy to call across a yard and quick for a vet office to spell. And if your cat insists on co-authoring your work from the keyboard, you already know the precedent: F.D.C. Willard got there first, in print, in 1975.