Stigler's Law of Eponymy
The notion that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Examples include Hubble's law (derived by Georges Lemaître two years before Edwin Hubble), the Pythagorean theorem (known to Babylonian mathematicians before Pythagoras), and Halley's comet (observed by astronomers since at least 240 BC).
Origin
Proposed by University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler in 1980 in a festschrift honoring sociologist Robert K. Merton. Stigler designed the law to be self-referential and ironic, explicitly crediting Merton as the true originator—Merton had previously described this pattern in his 1957 paper "Priorities in Scientific Discovery." By naming it after himself while acknowledging Merton, Stigler demonstrated the very phenomenon he was describing.