Stigler’s Law is states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Halley’s Comet, Fibonacci numbers, the Pythagorean theorem, and the Bechdel test all bear the names of people who didn’t discover or formulate them. The funny thing is, Stephen Stigler, the University of Chicago statistics professor credited with this law of eponymy, wryly claims that sociology professor Robert K. Merton was the first to come up with it. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Stigler’s Law”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
Grant, you know what Venn diagrams are.
Yeah, the two circles, each with meaning, and where they intersect, there’s the thing that they have in common.
Right. And my whole life I’ve known those as Venn diagrams.
But, you know, John Venn, who popularized them in the 1880s, wasn’t the person who invented them.
That was Leonard Euler.
Euler? Like O-I-L-E-R? Euler?
Well, it’s spelled E-U-L-E-R, but he was Swiss.
And he had introduced them almost a century before.
And, you know, there are a lot of concepts like this, a lot of terms that we have that are associated with one person, but were actually discovered by another person, say Halley’s Comet, which was familiar to, you know, people back in before the birth of Christ.
Right.
And even the Bechdel test, you know, which is that test that’s used now to determine sexism in movies, right?
Or a minimum amount of attention paid to women that doesn’t focus on men, right?
Right.
It’s like the barest minimum.
Right.
And that’s credited to Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist who did the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and wrote Fun Home.
But she’s always tried to make the point that she didn’t come up with that.
Her friend Liz Wallace did, but she got credited with it.
It’s called the Bechdel test.
And I found out that there’s a term for this actual phenomenon of things being attributed to somebody who didn’t actually come up with them.
It’s called Stigler’s Law.
And did Stigler come up with it?
No, he didn’t.
That’s the thing.
Of course not.
Or at least he says he didn’t.
He’s a University of Chicago statistics professor who wrote about Stigler’s Law of Eponymy in a 1980 publication that states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
But he himself credits it to a guy, a sociologist named Robert Merton.
That’s cool.
Stigler’s Law, that an idea won’t be credited to the person who actually came up with that.
Right.
And it’s true, right?
I mean, throughout history.
And words kind of behave the same way.
The person who coined words is usually far less known than the person who popularized them.
Exactly.
If either are known at all.
Yeah, it’s funny the way language works, right?
Stigler’s Law.
Yeah, there’s a long list of these.
I mean, you can even look on Wikipedia.
I mean, the Fibonacci numbers.
Fibonacci didn’t do that.
No, no.
That was written about in Sanskrit by Indian mathematicians like years and years ago.
But Fibonacci brought it to, what, European attention?
Right.
So often somebody who popularizes an item isn’t the one who actually came up with it.
Ain’t that just the way.
Somebody always taking your credit.
Right.
Stealing your thunder.
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