Stigler’s Law of Eponymy

vandaag 14 maart 2010, 7 uur geleden | Greg Ross

Stigler’s Law of Eponymy states that “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” Examples:

• Arabic numerals were invented in India.
• Darwin lists 18 predecessors who had advanced the idea of evolution by natural selection.
• Freeman Dyson credited the idea of the Dyson sphere to Olaf Stapledon.
• Charles Wheatstone invented the Playfair cipher.
• Salmonella was discovered by Theobald Smith but named after Daniel Elmer Salmon.
• Copernicus propounded Gresham’s Law.
• Pell’s equation was first solved by William Brouncker.
• Euler’s number was discovered by Jacob Bernoulli.
• The Gaussian distribution was introduced by Abraham de Moivre.
• The Mandelbrot set was discovered by Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia.

University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler advanced the idea in 1980.
Delightfully, he attributes it to Robert Merton.
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