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A question posed on academia.SE prompts this follow-up question:

Is there an example of a famous physical law, constant, equation, theorem etc that was named after its discoverer by the discoverer him/herself?

Thinking of things like Newton's Laws, Josephson effect, Kalman filter, Turing machine, etc.

Usually these things are named by others - but did anyone ever say "I discovered what I propose to call the Jones effect"?

For reference, you can find a long list of "laws named after people" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientific_laws_named_after_people (with thanks to J.W. Perry for first posting the link, and to HDE226868 for restoring it when the original comment was deleted)

I'm sure it's not a complete list...

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    $\begingroup$ My guess is the closest will be some sort of taxonomist naming a species after themselves.. $\endgroup$
    – user2813274
    Dec 19, 2014 at 19:30
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    $\begingroup$ No we're not. You will find it was discussed in the comments of the original question linked above: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/34547/… $\endgroup$
    – Floris
    Dec 19, 2014 at 21:24
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    $\begingroup$ Parkinson's Laws. $\endgroup$
    – Alexandre Eremenko
    Dec 20, 2014 at 12:05
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    $\begingroup$ @AlexandreEremenko - that's a good one; the original article can be found at economist.com/node/14116121 and includes the line Before the discovery of a new scientific law—herewith presented to the public for the first time, and to be called Parkinson's Law* . Reading the whole article, it's clearly intended as an attempt at humor -- but the "Law" stuck... $\endgroup$
    – Floris
    Dec 20, 2014 at 19:52
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    $\begingroup$ @HDE226868 - that is clearly a great link to have. I will put it in the question so it doesn't disappear. $\endgroup$
    – Floris
    Dec 20, 2014 at 20:22

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This isn't really a physical law, nor is it exactly what you're asking for, but the statistical concept usually known as the "Akaike Information Criterion" (AIC) was indeed called AIC by Akaike, but with the name "an information criterion."

I don't know historically whether that was intentional or not, but when Sumio Watanabe called his extension the "Widely Applicable Information Criterion" (WAIC) the standard name of "Watanabe-Akaike Information Criterion" shortly followed.

Andrew Gelman has joked that he should develop an information criterion with Aki Vehtari and call it the "Very Good Information Criterion."

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In 2013, Harminder Dua announced the discovery of the eponymous Dua's layer in the eye. Wikipedia writes:

While some scientists welcomed the announcement, other scientists cautioned that time was needed for other researchers to confirm the discovery and its significance. Others have met the claim "with incredulity". The choice of the name Dua's Layer has also been criticized.

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Here is an interesting twist.

The Black-Scholes model for option pricing first appeared in:

Black, Fischer; Scholes, Myron (1973). "The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities". Journal of Political Economy 81 (3): 637–654.

where they derived and solved the governing partial differential equation, now referred to as the Black-Scholes equation. Robert Merton provided a crucial step in deriving the PDE rigorously using a dynamic hedging argument -- an improvement on an approach considered by Black and Scholes. He was subsequently acknowledged in a footnote.

Of course, there was no explicit reference to "Black-Scholes model" in the original publication. Later Merton published a paper where he named the model Black-Scholes.

Merton and Scholes were awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize Economics for this work. The model is now commonly referred to as the Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model.

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