Stigler's law concerns the supposed tendency of eponymous expressions for scientific discoveries to honor people other than their respective originators.
Arrhenius equation. The equation was first proposed by the Dutch chemist J. H. van 't Hoff in 1884; five years later in 1889, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius provided a physical justification and interpretation for it.
Bechdel test, a gender bias test for films popularised by and named after Alison Bechdel, creator of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, despite her repeated insistence that the test was devised by her friend Liz Wallace.
Bell numbers have been studied since the 19th century and even medieval Japan, but are named after Eric Temple Bell who wrote about them in the 1930s.
Bellman–Ford algorithm for computing the shortest-length path, proposed by Alfonso Shimbel, who presented the algorithm in 1954, but named after Richard Bellman and Lester Ford Jr., who published equivalent forms in 1956 and 1958.
Betteridge's law of headlines, stating that when a headline asks a (yes-no) question, the answer is no. Considered "an old truism among journalists", it was well known before Betteridge wrote about it in 2009.
Blount's disease was described independently by C. Mau (1923) and Harald Nilsonne (1929), both writing in German, before it was described in English by Walter Putnam Blount (1937).
Bode's law of 1772, stating that the distances of the planets from the sun follow a simple arithmetical rule, was first stated by Johann Titius in 1766, not Johann Elert Bode.
Since that definition predated Boyce and Codd's own definition by some three years, it seems to me that BCNF ought by rights to be called Heath normal form. But it isn't.[12]
Boyle's law, which stipulates the reciprocal relation between the pressure and the volume of a gas, was first noted by Richard Towneley and Henry Power. In France, the law is known as Mariotte's law, after Edme Mariotte, who published his results later than Boyle, but crucially added that the relation holds only when temperature is kept constant.
Brayton Cycle, as quoted from Wikipedia itself: The engine cycle is named after George Brayton (1830–1892), the American engineer who developed it originally for use in piston engines, although it was originally proposed and patented by Englishman John Barber in 1791.
Carmichael number: Václav Šimerka listed the first seven Carmichael numbers in 1885; they are named after Robert Daniel Carmichael who subsequently discovered the first one in 1910.[13]
Cardano's formula, the solution to general cubic equations. Cardano stated that it was discovered by Scipione del Ferro, who passed the knowledge to his student Antonio Maria Fior. Around 1535 Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia learned of this from Fior and re-derived the formula for the cubic, which he later shared with Cardano.[14][15]
Chebyshev's inequality guarantees that, for a wide class of probability distributions, no more than a certain fraction of values can be more than a certain distance from the mean. It was first formulated by his friend and colleague Irénée-Jules Bienaymé in 1853 and proved by Chebyshev in 1867.
Chernoff bound, a bound on the tail distribution of sums of independent random variables, named for Herman Chernoff but due to Herman Rubin.[20]
De Morgan's laws of logic, transformation rules of propositional logic. Named after 19th-century British mathematician Augustus De Morgan, but already known to medieval philosophers such as Jean Buridan.
Euler's formula: an equivalent formula was proved by Roger Cotes 30 years before Euler published his proof.
F
Farey sequence. Cauchy published the proof to a conjecture put forth by Farey. Unknown to both men, similar results had been published earlier by Charles Haros.
The Floyd–Warshall algorithm for finding shortest paths in a weighted graph is named after Robert Floyd and Stephen Warshall who independently published papers about it in 1962. However, Bernard Roy had previously published an equivalent algorithm in 1959.
Fresnel lens. The idea of creating a thinner, lighter lens by making it with separate sections mounted in a frame is often attributed to Georges-Louis Leclerc.
Fibonacci numbers. Fibonacci was not the first to discover the famous sequence. They existed in Indian mathematics since 200 BC (Fibonacci gave the series in 1202 AD).
Halley's comet was observed by astronomers since at least 240 BC, but named after Edmond Halley who computed its orbit and accurately predicted its return.
Kronecker product: Johann Georg Zehfuss already in 1858 described the matrix operation we now know as the Kronecker product
L
L'Hôpital's rule to calculate the limit of quotient of functions at a point were both functions converge to 0 (or both converge to infinity) is named after Guillaume de l'Hôpital, but is generally believed to have been discovered by Johann Bernoulli.
Lhermitte's sign in neurology, the "barber chair phenomenon" was first described by Pierre Marie and Chatelin. French neurologist Jean Lhermitte published his first report three years later.
Norman's law, proposed by Donald Norman, is a general restatement of Stigler's Law, "No saying or pronouncement is named after its originator." This law was named for Norman as an example of Stigler's Law – which was, itself, not named after its originator.[30]
Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. The name Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem honours Harry Nyquist and Claude Shannon, but the theorem was also previously discovered by E. T. Whittaker (published in 1915) and Shannon cited Whittaker's paper in his work. (from Wikipedia)
O
The Oort cloud around the Solar System was first postulated by Ernst Öpik in 1932 and independently introduced by Jan Oort in 1960.
Olbers' paradox was formulated by Kepler in the 17th century, long before Olbers was born.
Pell's equation, studied in ancient India but mistakenly attributed to John Pell by Leonhard Euler. Apparently Euler confused Lord Brouncker (first European mathematician to find a general solution of the equation) with Pell.
Pfizer vaccine, a COVID-19mRNA vaccine developed by BioNTech. Due to its small size, BioNTech partnered with the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Fosun for support with clinical trials, logistics and manufacturing. The vaccine's clinical name is BNT162b2 and it is currently marketed under the name Comirnaty.
Playfair's axiom, an alternative to Euclid's fifth postulate on parallel lines, first stated by Proclus in the 5th century AD but named after John Playfair after he included it in his 1795 book Elements of Geometry and credited it to William Ludlam.
Poisson spot: predicted by Fresnel's theory of diffraction, named after Poisson, who ridiculed the theory, especially its prediction of the existence of this spot.[33] It is also called the Arago spot as François Arago observed it or the Fresnel bright spot after Augustin-Jean Fresnel's theory, though it had already been observed by Joseph-Nicolas Delisle and Giacomo F. Maraldi a century earlier.
Prim's algorithm, developed in 1930 by the Czech mathematician Vojtěch Jarník and independently rediscovered by Prim in 1957.
Prinzmetal angina, also known as variant angina, referring to angina (chest pain) caused by vasospasm of the coronary arteries. Described twice in the 1930s before being published by Prinzmetal in 1959.[34][35][36]
Pythagorean theorem, named after the mathematician Pythagoras, although it was known before him to Babylonian mathematicians (although it is not known if the Babylonians possessed a proof of the result; yet it is not known either whether Pythagoras proved the result).
Richards equation is attributed to Richards in his 1931 publication, but was earlier introduced by Richardson in 1922 in his book "Weather prediction by numerical process." (Cambridge University press. p. 262) as pointed out by John Knight and Peter Raats in "The contributions of Lewis Fry Richardson to drainage theory, soil physics, and the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum" EGU General Assembly 2016.
The Smith chart in radio frequency engineering is named after Phillip Hagar Smith, who published about it in 1939. However, it was independently invented by Tosaku Mizuhashi in 1937 and Amiel R. Volpert in 1939.
Wilson Cycle, named in 1974 by Kevin C. A. Burke after the Canadian geologist J. Tuzo Wilson for Wilson's 1966 proposal that the Atlantic Ocean had previously closed and then opened again, a theory that the Swiss geologist Émile Argand had proposed in the 1920s.
Y
Yagi–Uda antenna, a successful and popular beam antenna, whose primary inventor was Shintaro Uda, but which was popularized by, and formerly popularly named for, his collaborator Hidetsugu Yagi.
Z
Zipf's law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. The law is named after George Kingsley Zipf, an early twentieth century American linguist. Zipf popularized Zipf's law and sought to explain it, though he did not claim to have originated it.[39]Jean-Baptiste Estoup was the first person to note this regularity in word frequencies.
^Bonferroni, C. E., Teoria statistica delle classi e calcolo delle probabilità, Pubblicazioni del R Istituto Superiore di Scienze Economiche e Commerciali di Firenze 1936
^Heath, I. "Unacceptable File Operations in a Relational Database." Proc. 1971 ACM SIGFIDET Workshop on Data Description, Access, and Control, San Diego, California (November 11–12, 1971).
^Date, C.J. Database in Depth: Relational Theory for Practitioners. O'Reilly (2005), p. 142.
^Duhem, Pierre (1891). Leçons sur l'électricité et le magnétisme (in French). Paris Gauthier-Villars. vol. 1, ch. 4, p. 22–23. shows that Lagrange has priority over Gauss. Others after Gauss discovered "Gauss's Law", too.
^Stargazer, the Life and Times of the Telescope, by Fred Watson, p. 134
^[Analyse Mathématique. Sur Les Probabilités des Erreurs de Situation d'un Point Mem. Acad. Roy. Sei. Inst. France, Sci. Math, et Phys., t. 9, p. 255-332. 1846]
^[Wright, S., 1921. Correlation and causation. Journal of agricultural research, 20(7), pp.557-585]
^Parkinson, J, Bedford, DE. Electrocardiographic changes during brief attacks of angina pectoris. Lancet 1931; 1:15.
^Brow, GR, Holman, DV. Electrocardiographic study during a paroxysm of angina pectoris. Am Heart J 1933; 9:259.
^Prinzmetal, M, Kennamer, R, Merliss, R, et al. A variant form of angina pectoris. Preliminary report. Am Heart J 1959; 27:375.
^For example Henry Dudeney noted in his 1917 Amusements in Mathematicssolution 129 that Pell's equation was called that "apparently because Pell neither first propounded the question nor first solved it!"
^Grattan-Guinness, Ivor (1997): The Rainbow of Mathematics, pp. 563–564. New York, W. W. Norton.
^Powers, David M W (1998). "Applications and explanations of Zipf's law". Joint conference on new methods in language processing and computational natural language learning: Association for Computational Linguistics: 151–160. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)