Stigler's Law

Stigler's Law, also known as the Law of Eponyms , is an empirical law proposed by the US statistics professor Stephen Stigler . It says that no scientific discovery is named after its discoverer.

There is actually an overwhelming abundance of names in science that do not bear the name of the actual discoverer. The reasons for this misnomer are that hardly any discoverer names his discovery himself, but this is mostly done by subsequent researchers. It is also known that famous scientists are much more likely to be cited than unknown ones, and that they are therefore all the more likely to fall under the table when naming them.

According to his own logic, Stigler named Robert Merton as the discoverer of his law , who postulated something similar in the Matthew effect .

Examples

• The Gaussian distribution was not described for the first time by Carl Friedrich Gauß , but by Abraham de Moivre .
• The rule of de l'Hospital comes from Johann I Bernoulli .
• The Fibonacci sequence was discovered by Indian mathematicians.
• The Comet Halley was not Edmund Halley discovered it was formerly known.
• The Pythagorean theorem was known in Babylon and India long before Pythagoras of Samos .
• The Asperger's syndrome was not first of Hans Asperger , but already in 1926 by the Russian doctor Grunja Yefimovna Sucharewa discovered.
• The Coriolis force was not derived from Gaspard Gustave de Coriolis until 1835 . The first mention of a distracting force on moving bodies in rotating frames of reference (without mathematical derivation) as early as 1651 is attributed to Giovanni Battista Riccioli . Other first discoverers are: Pierre-Simon Laplace , who considered the Coriolis force in his theory of the tides in 1776 , as well as Colin Maclaurin and Leonhard Euler .
• The Wheatstone measuring bridge was invented by Samuel Hunter Christie .
• The parable of Buridan's donkey was first discussed by al-Ghazālī . Johannes Buridan took up the underlying philosophical idea, but without using the image of a donkey in front of two haystacks, which is the basis of the naming.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Robert Czepel: The discovery before the discovery. science.ORF.at, accessed on July 31, 2020 .