Stigler's law of eponymy

Stigler's law of eponymy, proposed by University of Chicagostatistics professor Stephen Stigler in 1980, states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Examples include Hubble's law, which was derived by Georges Lemaître two years before Edwin Hubble; the Pythagorean theorem, which was known to Babylonian and Indian mathematicians before Pythagoras; and Halley's Comet, which was observed by astronomers since at least 240 BC (although its official designation is due to the first ever mathematical prediction of such astronomical phenomenon in the sky, not to its discovery). Eponymic inventions not named after their first inventor are generally also seen as examples of this law in action.

Stigler attributed the discovery of Stigler's law to sociologistRobert K. Merton, making "Stigler's law" an example of Stigler's law.

In his paper, Stigler wrote:

I have chosen as a title for this paper, and for the thesis I wish to present and discuss, "Stigler's law of eponymy". At first glance this may appear to be a flagrant violation of the "Institutional Norm of Humility", and since statisticians are even more aware of the importance of norms than are members of other disciplines, I hasten to add a humble disclaimer. If there is an idea in this paper that is not at least implicit in Merton's The Sociology of Science, it is either a happy accident or a likely error. Rather I have, in the Mertonian tradition of the self-confirming hypothesis, attempted to frame the self-proving theorem. For "Stigler's Law of Eponymy" in its simplest form is this: "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."

The same observation had previously also been made by many others.