Stigler's law of eponymy

Stigler's law of eponymy is the observation that scientific discoveries are not named after their original discoverers. Stephen Stigler credited sociologist Robert K. Merton with the idea.

Stephen Stigler: An American statistician known for work on the history of statistics and the law of eponymy. He named the law and explicitly credited Merton rather than claiming its idea.
Bayes' theorem: A theorem relating conditional probabilities and providing a way to update beliefs with evidence. Thomas Bayes's result was developed and published after his death by Richard Price.
Eponymy: The practice of naming something after a person, place, or group. Scientific eponyms are one specialized form of naming through personal attribution.
Matilda effect: The systematic tendency to overlook or under-credit women's contributions to science. It identifies a gendered pattern of lost credit that eponymy alone does not explain.
Robert K. Merton: An American sociologist whose work examined scientific norms, institutions, and the sociology of knowledge. Stigler attributed the law's underlying observation to Merton's earlier discussions.
Stokes' theorem: A theorem connecting a surface integral of curl to a line integral around its boundary. William Thomson formulated the result before George Stokes made it widely known through an examination problem.
Scientific citation: A reference in scholarly work that identifies and credits earlier research. Citation can preserve earlier contributions even when an eponym points elsewhere.
Collective credit: Recognition assigned to a group rather than to a single individual. It offers an alternative to eponyms that compress collaborative work into one name.
Stigler's law of eponymy in statistics: The application of Stigler's observation to statistical methods and results bearing later researchers' names. Statistical history supplies prominent examples behind Stigler's formulation.
Gibbs phenomenon: The persistent overshoot near a jump discontinuity when a function is approximated by Fourier sums. Henry Wilbraham described the effect before it became associated with Josiah Willard Gibbs.

Linked from 1 page

EponymBroader topic: It highlights how eponymous credit can diverge from historical priority.