Get Your Own Eponymous Law

Always wanted to achieve intellectual immortality? Now it’s possible thanks to Samuel Arbesman—a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School—who shows us how to get a theorem, formula or law named after yourself, in a few easy steps.

Of course, before you go out and begin to grace the world with your newly minted eponymous idea, don’t forget Stigler’s Law of Eponymy: “No scientific law is named after its original discoverer.” (Stephen Stigler attributes this to Robert Merton.) This law, which we shall generously apply to all realms of knowledge, has the following implication: By naming a concept after yourself, you have just established that someone else thought of the idea first. But that’s the risk you have to take in achieving intellectual immortality, and making your way toward the Arbesman Limit.

via Seed

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