Photochrome of a glacier, Grindelwald, Switzerland, c. 1890. © Rijksmuseum

Discovery

Volume X, Number 2 | spring 2017

Miscellany

Statistician Stephen Stigler wrote in 1980, “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” He identified this as a basic law of eponymy, admitted he was an “outsider to the sociology of science” acting in “flagrant violation of the institutional norms of humility,” and named the law after himself.

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.

—Herman Melville, 1853