Strange acknowledgment in Serge Lang's Linear Algebra Recently I open this book to look up a certain theorem and saw something
peculiar about the acknowledgments I've never notice before:

Acknowledgments 
I thank Ron Infante and Peter Pappas for assisting with the proof reading 
  and for useful suggestions and corrections. I also thank Gimli Khazad for 
  his corrections. 
S.L.

The first two seem to be the (real) mathematicians Ronald P. Infante and Peter Chris Pappas
but the third name is quite suspicious: everything I can find about this name is either related to the famous dwarf from Lord of the Rings or a small town in Canada. What's even more funny is that the surname "Khazad", in the fictional dwarven language created by Tolkien, means "dwarves".
Is Serge Lang thanking Gimli the dwarf? Was he known to make pratical jokes? This is too much of a coincidence.
EDIT:
Here's a link to the book. The acknowledgments are after the foreword.
 A: I knew Gimli from Kalamazoo around 1973.  I roomed with him for a while.  I did not know that his name was John Pillar until his father called asking for him by that name.  I told him that he must have the wrong number and then his father said that he goes by the name of Gimli (in a somewhat regretful tone). Gimli told me that started at the University of Chicago at age 15.  When he got there, he said that there so many amazing things going on that he stayed up 2 weeks without sleeping and wound up being hospitalized and given electroshock treatments several times. I recall that said that he was taking medicines which along with the electroshock reduced his abilities to some degree. It sounds like he had a bipolar manic episode.  He actually looked somewhat like his namesake with long hair and a scraggly beard.
He was a very friendly and helpful person, well liked by all.  He used to hang out at the campus Episcopal Center which is where I met him.  He was a well thought of tutor for math and he helped me several times.  He was an avowed communist but thought that his landlord was a great guy. He also ran for local office a few times without success most recently around 2007.
I remember Gimli saying that he said that he was studying cueing.  I believe that he was working on a PhD at that time.
A: Some googling shows that member of the MAA and poet Ayshhyah E. Khazad (1944, Kalamazoo, Michigan) (aka  Asha Khazad, aka Gimli Khazad, born John Pilaar) has a degree in mathematics from Western Michigan University. He participated in the Putnam competition in 1964, when he was a sophomore. Lang's book was published in 1966. The material covered there is rather elementary so it seems plausible that he would have been able to proofread Lang's book for him. He might have helped Kenneth Ross too, as another Gimli Khazad is acknowledged here.
