User:Robkelk/sandbox/Stigler's law of eponymy
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It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite—that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.
—Mark Twain, Letter to Helen Keller
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Stigler's law of eponymy, in its original 1980 meaning, says that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. The Other Wiki has a longer writeup of the phenomonon, complete with a list of examples in the sciences.
The effect isn't limited to scientific discoveries, though, as Mark Twain explains in this page's quote. Small Reference Pools points out that nobody has heard of everything, so this effect pops up in practically every walk of life.
Stigler's law of eponymy is attributed by Stigler to Robert K. Merton, making it a self-demonstrating law.
Examples of Robkelk/sandbox/Stigler's law of eponymy include:
Tropes
- The Bechdel Test: Stated by Liz Wallace, named for its popularizer Alison Bechdel.
- Do Not Call Me "Paul" is what TV Tropes calls Deadnaming.
- Word, Schmord: Both an example of, and a list of other examples of, Shm-reduplication.
- You Already Changed the Past: Law of Conservation of History is Larry Niven's name for what "serious" scientists would later call the Novikov self-consistency principle. The TV Tropes name came even later.