[HN Gopher] Stigler's Law of Eponymy
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       Stigler's Law of Eponymy
        
       Author : sriku
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2022-07-24 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | outlace wrote:
       | After some deliberation, I think this mostly makes sense and
       | shouldn't be upsetting. If someone discovers/invents something
       | important but isn't capable of communicating that new thing for
       | whatever reason then no one else can benefit from it. Later
       | someone else independently discovers it and is capable of
       | popularizing it and then people can actually benefit from it. So
       | we are often naming things after the popularizers or people who
       | figure out how to make a discovery widely applicable, and they
       | are often at least or more important than the original
       | discoverer.
        
         | atrettel wrote:
         | I think your perspective underestimates the political or
         | nationalistic aspects of naming things. Take the "Mach number"
         | as an example. It is named after Ernst Mach by aerodynamics
         | expert Jakob Ackeret, but it was Christian Doppler who first
         | came up with the number in his research about the Doppler
         | effect.
         | 
         | The issue is that for a while people in different countries
         | called the Mach number something different depending on what
         | country there were from. The Soviet Russians did not initially
         | call it the "Mach number" due to Lenin's criticism of Mach's
         | (unrelated) philosophical work. Some Soviet Russians called it
         | the "Mayevsky number" after a Russian general who did related
         | artillery work that used the concept, but eventually they
         | called it the Mach number. Similarly, some French engineers
         | called it the "Sarrau number" or "Moisson number" for a while
         | before the term "Mach number" stuck. The British sometimes
         | called it "specific speed", which to me is even more confusing,
         | but they also switched to "Mach number" eventually.
         | 
         | My point is that names can be controversial, depending on what
         | perspective you are coming from. Some people might call
         | something a different name just to make it align with their
         | worldview a little better.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | smitty1e wrote:
         | I say this on the job to my tech colleagues who hate
         | documenting accomplishments:
         | 
         | "Doing the job is half the work; the other half is advertising
         | the work."
         | 
         | If our RB-trees fall in the cloud-forest and the customer never
         | hears, how can our praises be sung?
        
           | helpfulclippy wrote:
           | software is half programming, half planning, half
           | documentation, and the rest is just luck
        
           | glitchc wrote:
           | Advertising is insufficient. It is ultimately a popularity
           | contest that plays out for a particular work being accepted
           | into the general consensus. It's altogether a very sad state
           | of affairs.
        
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       (page generated 2022-07-24 23:01 UTC)