Has there ever been a case where someone wished a theorem or important result wasn't named after them? Has it happened more than once?

Question

The current answers to the Academia HNQ Should I ask for permission to name a mathematical theorem? include the following (small excerpts):

There is no need to ask permission, and mostly likely they will be happy to have the theorem referred to with their names.

and

I suppose there is no formal need to ask for permission, but

1. I see no harm in doing so.
2. I see the potential for harm in not doing so.

The first can be loosely paraphrased as "go for it" and "it would be bad if you didn't" but the second seems like excellent advice.

I thought I'd ask here if there are any examples that might inspire words of caution as expressed in the 2nd answer, so I'd like to ask:

Question: Has there ever been a case where someone wished a theorem or important result wasn't named after them? Has it happened more than once?

Answer 1

On the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem:

It is somewhat ironic that Skolem's name is connected with the upward direction of the theorem as well as with the downward direction:

"I follow custom in calling Corollary 6.1.4 the upward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem. But in fact Skolem didn't even believe it, because he didn't believe in the existence of uncountable sets." – Hodges (1993).

"Skolem [...] rejected the result as meaningless; Tarski [...] very reasonably responded that Skolem's formalist viewpoint ought to reckon the downward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem meaningless just like the upward." – Hodges (1993).

"Legend has it that Thoralf Skolem, up until the end of his life, was scandalized by the association of his name to a result of this type, which he considered an absurdity, nondenumerable sets being, for him, fictions without real existence." – Poizat (2000).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B6wenheim%E2%80%93Skolem_theorem#Historical_notes

Answer 2

According to a recent episode of PBS Space Time, Freeman Dyson "regretted" the Dyson Sphere being named after him.

According to the Wikipedia article

Dyson was not the first to advance this idea. He was inspired by the 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon,...

The PBS episode states that Dyson referred to the concept as the Stapledon Sphere as Dyson was trying to "avoid having his own name attached to the idea".

Answer 3

I cannot easily document the chatter about it, but G. ("Beppo", for "Giuseppe") Levi in 1906 used what we'd now call a "Sobolev space", to prove an actual (=true) minimum principle for certain vector spaces of functions. (Thus, actually giving a true, and, mercifully, sufficient version of "Dirichlet's principle" (about existence and uniqueness of a maximizing vector...) for most applications.)

The story I'd heard is that "the French" referred to such spaces (in French) as "the spaces of Beppo Levi", and pronounced in such a way that was somehow degrading to Levi.

Apparently, Levi objected to this... and, since the rest of Levi's life he worked on other things, his name was removed from such reference, and now it's "Sobolev spaces". There are various pseudo-historical accounts of how Sobolev came to agree to that renaming, etc. I cannot vouch for any of that, etc.

Answer 4

Diffie–Hellman key exchange is not a case where a person wishes it weren't named after them per se, but it is a case where they are unhappy that it is named after them while excluding another contributor:

In 2002, Hellman suggested the algorithm be called Diffie–Hellman–Merkle key exchange in recognition of Ralph Merkle's contribution to the invention of public-key cryptography (Hellman, 2002), writing:

"The system...has since become known as Diffie–Hellman key exchange. While that system was first described in a paper by Diffie and me, it is a public key distribution system, a concept developed by Merkle, and hence should be called 'Diffie–Hellman–Merkle key exchange' if names are to be associated with it. I hope this small pulpit might help in that endeavor to recognize Merkle's equal contribution to the invention of public key cryptography."

Answer 5

Let me tell two anecdotes related to the question:

1. Once during a seminar talk Hilbert asked: "What is a Hilbert space?"

2. Arnold, apparently envious for so many things named after Anosov, once proposed the term "Anosov's jet" (струя Аносова, in Russian) Anosov's reaction is not recorded, but everyone was sure that he was not happy:-)

Remark. Sometimes a term containing a name can be indeed ridiculous, for example look at the title of this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.1403. As far as I know, Devaney was not offended:-)

Answer 6

A near miss that I found is Lewis Fry Richardson, from Wikipedia: "According to Thomas Körner, the discovery that his meteorological work was of value to chemical weapons designers caused him to abandon all his efforts in this field, and destroy findings that he had yet to publish."

Perhaps some other exists who published first and then found that their work had applications that they found objectionable after it was too late--I found Richardson by searching for mathematicians who were also peace activists, but you could search the other way by finding named theorems which were used for especially objectionable things.

Answer 7

There's a story, weakly cited on his wikipedia page (citation goes to a specific page in a book which doesn't seem to back it up, but I can't read the next page in the google books preview so maybe it's there) that Paul Dirac referred to what everyone else calls "Fermi-Dirac statistics" as "Fermi statistics", and "for reasons of symmetry" called the other type "Bose statistics" instead of "Bose-Einstein statistics".

I've also heard a story that I can't back up at all (and so is possibly apocryphal) that whenever someone would refer to Rabi cycles or the Rabi frequency in a conference, if he was in the audience he would stick his hand up and ask what they meant until they explained it in basic terms which didn't include his name.

Both of these are examples of alleged humility (though you could argue about how humble slowing down a talk is) rather than any dismay about the discoveries themselves.

Answer 8

S.S. Chern resisted calling Chern classes by name for the longest time. He eventually gave in with a comment to the effect that everyone calls them by that name, so he should start too. I read the latter in one of his expository papers but cannot find it at the moment. Chern was a very humble man.