“No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer”
The quote in the title is called Stigler’s law of eponymy (aka Steiner’s law), summarising the common phenomenon that achievements are frequently named after the populariser or re-discoverer rather than the original source. Examples include Hubble’s law, which was derived by Georges Lemaître two years before Edwin Hubble; the Pythagorean theorem, which was known to Babylonian mathematicians before Pythagoras.
Stigler attributed the discovery of Stigler’s law to sociologist Robert K. Merton, from whom Stigler stole credit so that it would be an example of Stigler’s law.
While the phenomenon affects many people regardless of gender, for International Women’s Day I thought I share a couple of great women in history, who created incredibly influential work, but their names are often eclipsed by their collaborators and/or husbands’ names.
Irene Ann Stegun was an American mathematician at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) who edited a classic book of mathematical tables called A Handbook of Mathematical Functions, widely known as Abramowitz and Stegun.
Karen Spärck Jones invented the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weighting, a revolutionary technique that transformed information retrieval. However, her name is rarely mentioned alongside this influential contribution.
Pálné Veres (In Hungarian: Mrs. Pál Veres; née: Hermin Beniczky) was a pioneering Hungarian advocate for women’s education in the 19th century. From the 1840s, she gave speeches and wrote articles stressing the importance of educating women and girls to create engaged mothers and productive citizens. In 1867, she organised a conference that led to establishing the Hungarian National Association for Women’s Education, of which she became president. When the Hungarian government refused to sanction secondary education for girls after making primary schooling compulsory in 1868, Veres spearheaded a petition drive. After that failed, the association opened Hungary’s first secondary school for women with Veres as director.
Harriet Taylor Mill (née Harriet Hardy) was an English philosopher and women’s rights advocate who had a profound impact on her husband John Stuart Mill’s influential essays and works. Though she made many contributions over the years, little of her own work was published under her own name during her lifetime.
There is a sneaky, partial example of Stigler’s law. The Barabási–Albert model is an algorithm for generating random scale-free networks using a preferential attachment mechanism. Several natural and human-made systems, including the Internet, the World Wide Web, citation networks, and some social networks are thought to be approximately scale-free. The algorithm is named after its inventors Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert. However, the naming of the model could be a bit misleading, combined with the fact that Albert-László Barabási is more well-known than his collaborator.
I have to add that popularising scientific and other achievements is an essential contribution on its own. Moreover, generally, I believe the individualistic view of any achievement, Intellectual Property, artwork etc is usually overrated. Nevertheless, today, I felt like celebrating our brilliant, innovative and entrepreneurial women whose names and identities often stay in the background.
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