P.D. FAQ

Q: What do people call you?

A: P.D.

Q: What does the D stand for?

A: The D doesn't stand for anything.

Q: How should your name be written in an academic citation?

A: I publish as P.D. Magnus, so the appropriate citation is "Magnus, P.D." even if the journal style does not require initials. That matches my ORCid and Phil People profile.

Q: What is your real name?

A: Depends on what you mean by real. My full legal name is Paul Frederic Brown Magnus, but nobody calls me that. Unless you are drafting a legal contract, you don't need it.

Under no circumstances should my name be written as "Paul D. Magnus." That makes no sense at all, and it only happens on junk mail from organizations who don't know who I am.

Q: Why P.D.?

A: I was rather young when I decided I didn't want to be called Paul. There were too many Pauls. Frederic would be shortened to Fred, and that was simply unthinkable. PF risked conflation with the athletic shoe, PF Flyers. So I made it up.

Q: Were there jokes about your name when you were a kid?

A: Only sometimes. Occasional Police Department jokes. I grew up in the 1980's, so there were also a few puns about Magnus, P.D. in parody of the television detective.

Q: Have you ever given people some specious answer, just to satisfy them?

A: Of course. I would say, for instance, that the D was an advance scout of an alien invasion force. Nobody ever laughed, so I stopped saying that. For a while, I told people that my middle name was Frederic but that the F-R-E was silent. They would usually puzzle about this for a while before realizing that I was pulling their leg.

When I got married, my wife and I both took her maiden as a second middle name. That's how it is Paul Frederic Brown Magnus. I can now say that the D is a single letter interpolated between my two middle initials, F and B.

Q: I have encountered research in organic chemistry and public health by P.D. Magnus. Is that you?

A: Scientific journals often identify authors only by last name and initials. Even when the journal gives a full name, indices will often only include initials. Philip Magnus, the chemist at the University of Texas, does not go by 'P.D.' in his daily life. Neither does Peter Magnus, the physician in Oregon.

I only know about either of them because of the internet. When I first got a webpage, I was annoyed to find that Philip Magnus came up first in searches for me.

Q: Why did you pick P.D. rather than any other moniker?

A: For years I had no good answer to this question. In 1999, my parents proffered the theory that I derived it from Paul Piedmont, a nick-name my mother used when I was very small. This theory leaves me unimpressed. Why wouldn't I have just picked up the name Piedmont? Why letters?

The original Star Wars was released the year I turned three. Having a brother four years older and adults obliging enough to take us, I saw the movie something like eleven times in the theater. The cosmic adventure loomed large in my young consciousness. By third grade I was taken with Han Solo (my brother was a Luke partisan) but my early fascination was with the droids.

My grandmother used to recount how astonished I was to discover that she didn't know about R2-D2. I had already seen it many times by then, and I insisted she come to see the movie with us so that she would understand. Droids had letters for names, so maybe I wanted letters for a name too.

Q: Wouldn't that make you P2-D2?

A: It may have been a matter of negotiation. Noone would seriously have called me P2-D2, even if at three or four I would have wanted it. Although my father and grandfather at first resisted, everyone ultimately came around to calling me P.D.