Stigler’s Law of Eponymy

Stigler designed the law to be self-referential and ironic and explicitly credited Robert K. Merton, a sociologist of science, as the true originator of the idea. Merton had previously described this pattern in his influential 1957 paper “Priorities in Scientific Discovery”, where he examined the social processes behind how credit is allocated in science.

I have, in the Mertonian tradition of the self-confirming hypothesis, attempted to frame the self- proving theorem. For “Stigler’s Law of Eponymy” in its simplest form is this: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer”

Stigler 1980

In modern usage, Stigler’s Law is widely cited across disciplines. It serves as a wry reminder that fame, institutional prestige, and timing often determine who is remembered, rather than the act of discovery itself. It has become a touchstone in discussions of eponymy, historical misattribution, and the sociology of science.

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History of Stigler’s Law

1903 – Mark Twain (1835–1910) captures the ethos of attribution inflation and iterative plagiarism in a letter to Helen Keller and later quoted in his 1906 publication “What Is Man?“:

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

1916 – Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), English mathematician and philosopher, in his Presidential Address to the Mathematical and Physical Science Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science observed:

But to come very near to a true theory, and to grasp its precise application, are two very different things, as the history of science teaches us. Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

Whitehead, 1916

1957 – Robert King Merton (1910–2003) publishes Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science, introducing the concept of credit misallocation in science.

The eponym preserves the name of the scientist and, with it, the memory of the man’s contribution to science. It is a form of deferred recognition, granted by posterity…

It is not always the first who gains the eponym, but the most influential — the one who mobilises acceptance, who secures adoption.

Merton 1957

1968 – Merton coins the another closely related concept the “Matthew Effect” describing how famous scientists tend to receive more credit than lesser-known peers, even for identical work. He quotes from the Gospel According to St. Matthew:

“For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Matthew 25:29

The Matthew Effect consists in the accruing of greater increments of recognition for particular scientific contributions to scientists of considerable repute and the withholding of such recognition from scientists who have not yet made their mark.

Matthew 25:29 in Merton 1968

1968 – Carl Benjamin Boyer (1906-1976) proclaimed that mathematical theorems are not named after their original discoverers and supported this statement with over thirty examples in his text A History of Mathematics. One such example regarding Maclaurin in geometry:

…it is ironic that today his name is recalled almost exclusively in connection with a portion of analysis in which he had been anticipated by some half dozen earlier workers…Clio, the muse of history, often is fickle in the matter of attaching names to theorems!

Boyer 1968

1972 – Hubert C. Kennedy proposes Boyer’s Law echoing the principle of Stigler’s Law but restricted to the field of mathematics adding that i’t is perhaps interesting to note that this is probably a rare instance of a law whose statement confirms its own validity‘

Mathematical formulas and theorems are usually not named after their original discoverers.

Kennedy 1972

1979 – Mark M. Ravitch (1910–1989), eminent American surgeon, publishes “Dupuytren’s invention of the Mikulicz enterotome with a note on eponyms” and delivers a nuanced critique:

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.

Ravitch 1979

1980 – Stephen M. Stigler (b. 1941) formally states Stigler’s Law of Eponymy in his paper, humorously naming it after himself to illustrate its point. He credits Merton as the rightful originator and suggests the law is “self-proving” and “self-referential”.

No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer

Stigler 1980

1983 – Eugene Garfield (1925–2017) essay “What’s in a Name? The Eponymic Route to Immortality” offers several pointed reflections on the eponym phenomenon, aligning closely with the analysis of Merton and Stigler.

In science, the most satisfying immortality is to have one’s name become an eponym. It means that a contribution has become so fundamental that it enters the common vocabulary of a discipline.

Eponyms may honour the wrong person, may be misunderstood, or may be misapplied, but they endure because they offer a shorthand for a body of ideas — they name not just a person, but a paradigm

Garfield 1983

2002 – Scott E. Kern applies Stigler’s Law in a medical research context, arguing that scientific hypotheses such as the “two-hit” model of tumorigenesis, are often credited incorrectly, supporting Stigler’s broader thesis.

Present day – The law is widely cited in academic discourse and online emphasising the phenomenon of misattribution in scientific history.

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Associated Persons

• Mark Twain (1835–1910) – American writer. “The last man gets the credit and we forget the others.”
• Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) – Philosopher-mathematician. “Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.”
• Robert King Merton (1910–2003) – American sociologist. Identified the underlying phenomenon of misattributed discovery and priority disputes (1957, 1968).
• Carl Benjamin Boyer – American historian of mathematics. “Clio, the muse of history, often is fickle in the matter of attaching names to theorems!“
• Hubert Collings Kennedy (b. 1931) – American mathematician and historian. Proposed Boyer’s Law (1972)
• Mark M. Ravitch (1910–1989) – American surgeon. Critiqued fallibility of eponyms in medicine (1979).
• Stephen Mack Stigler (b. 1941) – American statistician; University of Chicago. Coined and named the law (1980).
• Eugene Garfield (1925–2017) – Information scientist. Explored the persistence and “immortality” of eponyms (1983).
• John C. Baez – “Any effect, constant, theorem or equation named after Professor X was first discovered by Professor Y, for some value of Y not equal to X“

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Alternative names

• Boyer’s Law (Kennedy, 1972)
• The Matthew Effect (Merton, 1968)
• Iterative Plagiarism (attributed to Mark Twain, 1903)
• Whitehead’s Principle (1916)
• Baez’s Law (informal, mathematics community) – Any effect, constant, theorem or equation named after Professor X was first discovered by Professor Y (≠ X)

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References

Historical references

• XLII. Letters of 1903 In: Mark Twain’s letters. 1917; 2: 730-731
• Whitehead AN. The organisation of thought. Science 1916; 44(1134): 409-419
• Merton RK. Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science. American Sociological Review 1957; 22(6): 635-659
• Merton RK. The Matthew Effect in Science: The Reward and Communication Systems of Science are Considered. Science, 1968; 159(3810): 56–63.
• Boyer CB. A History of Mathematics. 1968 [2e 1991,3e 2011]
• 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.
• Stigler SM. Stigler’s law of eponymy. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1980; 39: 147–58

Eponymous term review

• 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.