Saturday, April 9, 2011

Do the Work, Don't get the Credit

RJ Lipton discusses "Stigler's Law," today (from professor Stephen Stigler) which states that "no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer"... and Stigler notes Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of “Stigler’s Law.” :-)

http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/why-is-everything-named-after-gauss/

Wikipedia offers a list of examples here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_Stigler%27s_law

and a similar list here (specifically-related to mathematics):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_misnamed_theorems

(...just don't anyone try to tell me that Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann doesn't get full credit for the Riemann Hypothesis, okay!)

No comments: