Stephen Stigler

Biographical Timeline

• Born
• Died

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Medical Eponyms

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Key Medical Contributions

Iterative Plagiarism

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. Twain 1903

The following sentiments, expressed by MarK M Ravitch “My own feeling is that whatever their fallibility, eponyms illuminate the lineage of surgery and bring to it the color of old times, distinguished figures, ancient sieges, and pestilences, and continually remind us of the international nature of science. Fallible eponyms certainly may be. Given an eponym one may be sure (1) that the man so honored was not the first to describe the disease, the operation, or the instrument, or (2) that he misunderstood the situation, or (3) that he is generally misquoted, or (4) that (1), (2), and (3) are all simultaneously true …

Priority, in the award of an eponym, is not necessarily purely temporal: … in terms of importance to medicine and to the sick, the physician who convinces his colleagues of the value of a new procedure, which they then adopt, exceeds in significance his hapless fellow who devised the same procedure earlier but failed to gain its adoption. And by the same token, the individual who first clearly establishes the nature of a condition is usually more deserving of the eponym than the forgotten author of a mere description unearthed by diligent scholasticism or pure serendipity.

[https://archive.org/details/classicradiologi0000mull/mode/2up]

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Major Publications

• Stigler SM. Gergonne’s 1815 paper on the design and analysis of polynomial regression experiments. Historia Mathematica 1974; 1(4): 431-439
• Stigler SM. Mathematical Statistics in the Early States. Ann. Statist. 1978; 6(2): 239-265
• Stigler SM. Stigler’s law of eponymy. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1980; 39: 147–58
• Stigler SM. Who Discovered Bayes’s Theorem? The American Statistician 1983; 37(4): 290-296
• Stigler SM. The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900. 1986
• Stigler SM. Statistics on the Table: The History of Statistical Concepts and Methods. Cambridge. 1999
• Stigler SM. Isaac Newton as a Probabilist. Institute of Mathematical Statistics in Statistical Science, 2006; 21(3): 400-403
• Stigler SM. The Epic Story of Maximum Likelihood. Institute of Mathematical Statistics in Statistical Science, 2007; 22(3): 598-620
• Stigler SM. Karl Pearson’s Theoretical Errors and the Advances They Inspired. Institute of Mathematical Statistics in Statistical Science, 2008; 23(2): 261-271
• Stigler SM. The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom. 2016
• Stigler SM. Casanova’s Lottery: The History of a Revolutionary Game of Chance. 2022

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References

Biography

• Behan C. 1998 Quantrell Award: Stephen Stigler. University of Chicago Chronicle. 1998; 17
• Stephen Mack Stigler. Mathematics Genealogy Project

Eponymous terms

• XLII. Letters of 1903 In: Mark Twain’s letters. 1917; 2: 730-731
• Merton RK. Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science. American Sociological Review 1957; 22(6): 635-659
• Kennedy HC. Who Discovered Boyer’s Law? The American Mathematical Monthly, 1972; 79(1): 66-67
• Ravitch MM. Dupuytren’s invention of the Mikulicz enterotome with a note on eponyms. Perspect Biol Med. 1979; 22(2 Pt 1): 170-184.
• Garfield E. What’s in a name? The eponymic route to immortality. Essays of an Information Scientist, 1983; 6: 384-395
• Kern SE. Whose hypothesis? Ciphering, sectorials, D lesions, freckles and the operation of Stigler’s Law. Cancer Biol Ther. 2002 Sep-Oct;1(5):571-81.
• Benna P. Agostino Carducci, Marc Dax and Stigler’s law of eponymy. Neurol Sci. 2024 Apr;45(4):1809-1810.