My mother was a cat lover so I grew up in a house with one or more cats. She particularly liked ginger cats – and I inherited that gene. I have shared my life with many cats – always including at least one ginger cat.
The current cats in my life are Hypatia (on the left) and Eratosthenes (on the right). As with most ginger cats, they a both boys. Now, I know that Hypatia (who worked at the Great Library of Alexandria about 400 CE) was female and I had been saving up the name for a fluffy ginger female cat (a rarity, but I lived in hope).
When Hypatia arrived as a kitten, he was actually represented to me as a she, hence Hypatia. It was only after a few days that I came to suspect (confirmed by the vet) that she was actually a he, but the name stuck.
What’s in a name?
All my ginger cats over the years have been named after scientists, so there’s been Isaac (Newton), (Stephen) Hawking, (Albert) Einstein, Francis (Bacon), Copernicus and two Archimedes (the most recent one only departed from my life last year, aged almost 20 years old). Along the way there have also been several of tabby cats (Holly and Aqua), a coal black cat (Induna – from Rider Haggards books I read as a child), a fluffy grey (Greymalkin – from The Midnight Folk which I read as a child, not Macbeth) and a British Blue (at least that’s what he looked like, but he had no pedigree) called Bernie (shortened from Daniel Bernoulli – the mathematician/physicist who came up with Bernoulli’s equation, so important in fluid mechanics).
Robert Hart - author 