Category: Named after somebody else

The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• Charles Babbage – Designed three calculating engines and completed none. Held Newton's chair eleven years, never lectured. The Times got his birth year wrong in his obituary.
• John Flamsteed – First Astronomer Royal. Forty-three years on a star catalogue, a refusal to print it unfinished, and a bonfire of the three hundred copies printed for him.
• Grimble's razor – A principle of economy in argument: where a proposition entails something that cannot be entertained, the entailment is set aside and the proposition retained.
• Edmond Halley – He paid for the Principia, invented the isoline map, and is remembered for a comet he did not discover, under a name given it after he died.
• Edwin Hubble – He proved the universe is bigger than our galaxy, got every distance seven times too short, and refused to the end to call it expanding.
• Lord Kelvin – Fixed the bottom of the temperature scale and the age of the Earth. He got one of them right, and never said the sentence he is famous for.
• Henrietta Swan Leavitt – Employed at thirty cents an hour to measure star brightness on glass plates, she found the relation that tells us how far away everything is.
• Occam's razor – The principle of parsimony, named for a man who did not write the words, did not originate the idea, and was not the person the phrase was coined about.
• Pi – 3.14159…, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, which is the one length nobody draws a circle with. Also written as half of tau.
• Stigler's law of eponymy – No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer – a law its author credited to somebody else, making it an instance of itself.
• The telescope – Refused a patent in 1608 for being too easy to copy. Its most famous user did not invent it, did not name it, and was not the first to draw the Moon.

← All categories