2
$\begingroup$

Today I was surprized that someone on a social website claming the following property to be descovered by him

$$\int^\infty_0 f(x)g(x)\,dx = \int^\infty_0 (\mathcal{Lf})(s)(\mathcal{L}^{-1}g) (s)\,ds$$

Moreover, He puts his name on it calling it "His name" identity. Regardless of the fact that the identity is trivial, can someone do something like that ? Actually I was searching to find the name of the property but couldn't find a name or the "real" discoverer of the property? Can someone do something like that ? Is it a good practice ?

Up to my knowledge most of the known properties were given names by other scientists not by the same scientist how discovered it in the first place.

  • 4
    People can write anything they like on social media sites. I can't imagine that anyone other than the author will choose to follow his naming convention, however.2017-01-26
  • 3
    Is the identity trivial? I don't notice anything obvious. And no, mathematicians are not in the habit of naming theorems after themselves.2017-01-26
  • 0
    @zaid can you give us a link...sounds like an amusing person and i also think that the indentity is well known but not trivial2017-01-26
  • 0
    Furthermore it seems only to hold under some regularity assumptions, have the "scientist" in question properly included them? ;)2017-01-26
  • 1
    @Omnomnomnom, just Fubini theorem.2017-01-26

1 Answers 1

1

Ordinarily, modesty forbids naming an equation, principle, or theorem after one's self. If others read the paper and decide it contains something new and interesting or useful, they may reference the item as "due to Smith (2017)." After several respected authors have referenced the paper, people may find it convenient to refer the Smith Equation, Smith Theorem, or whatever.

However, this traditional mechanism of naming ideas after specific people does not by any means guarantee that the name that eventually associated with an idea is the name of its actual discoverer. A list of 'improperly-credited' ideas would be quite long, and there would probably be controversy about most of the items on the list. So I will give just a couple of examples that are more or less uncontroversial.

  • One famous example in statistics is "Student's t Distribution", which attracted considerable interest after publication in a 1908 paper by W.S. Gosset, published in an English journal under the pseudonym 'A Student' because of restrictions set by Gosset's employer. But (according to the account in Wikipedia) the distribution had been published a couple of times by others before 1908.

  • There seems to be solid evidence that "Pascal's Triangle" (an array of binomial coefficients) occurred in Chinese manuscripts (for unknown purposes) several hundred years before Pascal, and there are also pre-Pascal references to it from India, the middle-east, and Europe. (Also see Wikipedia.)

  • 2
    Stefan Banach reportedly called Banach spaces "spaces of type B" to give everyone the hint to name them after him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Banach And of course Stigler's law says that no scientific law is named after its actual discoverer. Stigler's law was first proposed by somebody else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy2017-01-27
  • 0
    Here is [a list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_Stigler%27s_law) from Wikipedia.2017-01-27