No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
Self-exemplifying by design — Stigler credited Merton for it. The Pythagorean theorem, Halley's comet and Gaussian distributions all have prior claimants.
In practice
- A team names an internal method after the engineer who documented it, and the engineer who devised it left two years earlier.
- A formula taught under one professor's name appears in a paper by his supervisor's supervisor, and the class is never told.
- Standing
- Self-exemplifying by design.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- The measured patterns of social life