Stigler's Law of Eponymy
Proposed by statistics professor Stephen Stigler in 1980, Stigler's Law of Eponymy posits that there isn't a scientific discovery named after a person that is named after the person who actually discovered it.
This runs contrary to the popular and understandable belief that, for instance, the Pythagorean Theorem, was named for Pythagoras because he discovered it. In actuality, this concept was already known to Babylonian mathematicians, and Pythagoras merely popularized it.
Similarly, Hubble's Law was developed by mathematician and astronomer Georges Lemaître a few years before Edwin Hubble figured it out and wrote about it, Euler's Formula was shown to be true by Roger Cotes several decades before Leonhard Euler published his proof, the Fermi Paradox was written about in an unpublished work by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky decades before Enrico Fermi discussed it, and the Jacobson's organ (located in the nasal septum) was originally described by botanist and anatomist Frederik Ruysch in 1703, but is named after Ludwin Jacobson who also discovered it in 1803.
The implication of this law is that the concept of eponymy—naming things after people—often has more to do with popularization than discovery or invention, and in many cases has more to do with which name happened to be printed first or published more widely than who did what, when.
This law overlaps, at times, with what's often called the Matthew Effect, or the Law of Accumulated Advantage, which was originally coined in reference to the tendency of prestigious scientists and other academics to accumulate more prestige because they are already prestigious: the famous get more famous because they're famous, the wealthy get wealthier because they're wealthy, but the opposite is also true because the non-prestigious don't have existing prestige to help them accumulate more prestige, and the impoverished have little existing wealth to help them generate more wealth.
In some cases, the people whose names are eventually attached to various concepts and discoveries have reputations or other social assets that give them an advantage over the actual discoverers of the things in question.
This asset can be the raw luck to be alive at the right time or to be connected to the right people, but it can also be related to their ability to speak to the right crowds, get published in the right publications, or to be well-known enough to have their name stick, while other, lesser-known colleagues’ names do not.
In some cases, the prevailing biases or prejudices of an era or region determine who gets credit.
The Matilda Effect refers to (the many and frequent) cases in which women scientists have had their work attributed to male colleagues or other male scientists who are working on parallel things, but who weren't the actual first discoverers or inventors of something.
Interestingly, this effect actually does seem to be named after the person who first described it (the 19th century suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, in an essay entitled Woman As An Inventor), even though it was coined in 1993 by a science historian named Margaret Rossiter.
Stigler's Law of Eponymy, appropriately, also fits under this law's umbrella: Stephen Stigler himself attributed the coining of the law to Robert K. Merton (who also coined the Matthew Effect), though other, earlier coiners have also been proposed.
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