Where Credit is Due...

There was this one time when my dad and I wondered who had come up with a particular equation in maths. The sources Google pointed to didn’t have a conclusive answer. It seemed to be the accepted practice to attribute the equation to one particular individual because he had been working on many related topics and seemed the most likely candidate, not because there was any record of him having actually found it!

My dad remarked that the tendency to glorify the discoverer is just a human quirk, and that truly glorious things can’t have ownership associated with them. But the issue here isn’t about ownership, it’s about credit.

One of the most famous battles over discovery is the one between Newton and Leibniz over who discovered calculus. It was a bitterly contested topic, with no quarters given. The issue gets even more muddied because Newton didn’t publish what he came up with for 20 years! Does it count if you didn’t show it to anybody for decades? Or as you find with Columbus, it doesn’t count if one found a “new land” (to Europeans, that is) but didn’t realize it!

And sometimes, once credit is given incorrectly, the convention doesn’t get updated even after the mistake is discovered. Like it happened with this rule in calculus for dealing with those pesky 0/0 problems: the L’Hôpital’s rule, named after its eponymous discover. After L’Hôpital died, Johann Bernoulli started claiming it was stolen from him. Given Bernoulli’s history of claiming credit for others’ discoveries, nobody believed him. It was a case of boy crying wolf: in this case, Bernoulli was being truthful as his correspondence with L’Hôpital proved. Yet even today it’s known (and taught) as L’Hôpital’s rule.

Sometimes it helps to imagine the counterfactual to see what it would feel like if credit was never being given to the discoverer. Or easier than that, just read this passage from Cixin Liu’s sci-fi book in Chinese titled Three-Body Problem:

“You changed the names of many physical laws and constants: Ohm’s law you called resistance law, Maxwell’s equations you called electromagnetic equations, Planck’s constant you call the quantum constant. You explain to your students that all scientific accomplishments resulted from the wisdom of the working masses, and those capitalist academic authorities only stole these fruits and put their names on them.”

You don’t need to be an Ayn Rand style rabid capitalist to squirm after reading that passage, do you?