That reminds me of Isaac Asimov's[0] story in Asimov Laughs Again about being confused with Arthur C. Clarke[1]. They had similar writing styles, so it was quite common for Isaac's books to be attributed to Arthur and vice versa. Childhood's End[2] was Arthur's most popular and well-known novel at the time.
At a science fiction convention, a woman said to me, "Dr. Asimov, I have just finished your book Childhood's End. I liked it, but I didn't think it was as good as your other books."
Maintaining a straight and solemn face (with an enormous effort), I said, "Yes, ma'am. I was frightfully disappointed in that book, which I thought was quite inferior. I therefore insisted it appear under the pseudonym of Arthur C. Clarke, Jr."
You're thinking of Stefan Mandel's International Lotto Fund[0]. They tried to buy every ticket in the Virginia state lottery in 1992. They won the money, but IIRC there were years of litigation.
Stefan Mandel is the man who won the lottery 14 times. He never disclosed the recipe he called combinatorial condensation, which enabled him to hit the Romanian lottery jackpot in the early phase of his betting career. Combinatorial condensation is frequently mixed up with another strategy known as buying the pot, which Stefan Mandel was pursuing later on. On occasion, he dropped a few hints on combinatorial condensation. The hints are applied in this work to narrow down and assess his initial recipe. The underlying theory resembles what a weekend mathematician, as he once referred to himself, may have encountered in the 1960s. Calculations indicate that he took residual risks that his method might fail. Residual risks explain why he changed his strategy from combinatorial condensation to buying the pot. The cardinality of the (15, 6, 6, 5)- and (49, 6, 6, 5)-lottery schemes shows that Stefan Mandel probably wasn't aware of lottery designs. First concepts on such topics had been available at that time, but coherent theories on combinatorial designs took off only in later decades, triggered by growing computing power, and eventually triggered by Stefan Mandel's publicity and successes in the field. But, as the comparison with actual covering designs reveals, Stefan Mandel most likely pioneered in constructing a (15, 6, 5)-covering design many years before others published about it, which he applied in the Romanian lottery.
These days, we have many better options, but back in the day, Fortran was also used for compilers (e.g., IBM's Fortran H), operating systems (such as PRIMOS[0] and LTSS[1]), symbolic computation (e.g., early Prolog implementations), and real-time control systems[2].
