The model is named after Renfrey Potts, who described the model near the end of his 1951 Ph.D. thesis. The model was related to the "planar Potts" or " clock model ", which was suggested to him by his advisor, Cyril Domb. The four-state Potts model is sometimes known as the Ashkin–Teller model, after Julius Ashkin and Edward Teller, who considered an equivalent model in 1943.