Stigler's law of eponymy
Why are things never named after their actual inventors/discoverers?
Table of Contents
There’s been so many instances when I find things not being named after the actual inventor. I finally have a name for this phenomenon.
Stigler’s law of eponymy states that no scientific discovery is named after its inventor.
Examples
- Bayes theorem was actually formulated and extended by Pierre-Simon Laplace.
- Gaussian distribution was actually invented by Abraham de Moivre.
- Gram-Schmidt process was known to Pierre-Simon Laplace.
- Cauchy distribution was first analyzed in detail by Poisson.