Stigler's law of eponymy

Why are things never named after their actual inventors/discoverers?
Jul 20, 2020Last updated: Sep 15, 2020

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.

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