By Jon Palmer, News Staff

The appearance of a mysterious bronze statue of a man petting a cat outside of Shillman Hall confused Northeastern students last February. The statue arrived seemingly overnight and was adorned with no plaque or signage explaining its origin. But the spotlight was never on the man in the statue – rather, it was on his furry friend.

“Shillman Cat” has risen to prominence as the most beloved statue on campus. He’s been featured on Boston.com, students can check in with him on FourSquare, he is the focus of several memes and someone even knit him a hat this winter. A parody Twitter handle, @shillmancat, provides occasional campus commentary, humor that is crude, cat-related or sometimes both, and catty criticism of Northeastern President Joseph Aoun. In the contest of the Best Campus Monument, Shillman Cat received a resounding 45 percent of votes, leaving the Ell Hall Husky and the Snell Engineering Arch to trail at 15 and 11 percent, respectively.

Few students knew that the statue is in fact of Robert J. Shillman, a member of Northeastern’s board of trustees and the namesake of the building he sits in front of. An identical statue is located at the Technion – the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, where Shillman has also donated money.

Created by Skylight Studios’ Robert Shure in Woburn, the statue is titled “A Man and a Cat Named Yitz.” According to a guide to statues and monuments from Technion in Israel, “As a young man, Shillman had spent a summer in the Faculty of Physics where he befriended one of the campus strays, Yitz.”

Yitz may be his true name, but Northeastern students have decided that Shillman Cat has a better ring to it.