Stigler’s law of eponymy states that no scientific discovery is named after the first person to discover it. Stephen Stigler acknowledged that he was not the first to realize this.
Of course this is just an aphorism. Sometimes discoveries are indeed named after their discoverers. But the times when this isn’t the case are more interesting.
Stigler’s law reveals something about human nature. The people who get credit for an idea are the ones who make their discovery known. They work in the open rather than in obscurity or secrecy. They may be the first to explain an idea well, or the first to popularize it, or the first to apply it to a problem that people care about. Apparently people value these things more than they value strict accounts of historical priority.
Related post: Stigler’s law and Avogadro’s number