Stigler's law of eponymy

Stigler's law or even law called the eponyms, is an empirical law, which was proposed by the U.S. statistics professor Stephen Stigler. It states that no scientific discovery is named after its discoverer.

There are actually an overwhelming abundance of naming in science that do not bear the name of the actual discoverer. The reasons for these false designations are that hardly an explorer discovering his own names, but this is usually done by subsequent researchers. It is also known that famous scientists are much more likely cited as unknown, and this therefore more likely to fall in the naming under the table.

According to its own logic Stigler has called the discoverer of his law Robert Merton, who postulated similar in Matthew effect.

Examples

• The Gaussian distribution has not been described by Carl Friedrich Gauss the first time, but by Abraham de Moivre.
• The rule of L'Hospital comes from Johann Bernoulli.
• The Fibonacci sequence was discovered by Indian mathematicians.
• Halley's comet was not discovered by Edmund Halley, but was formerly known.
• The Pythagorean theorem was known long before Pythagoras of Samos in Babylon and India.

• Etymology
• History of Science
• Semantics