On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 10:22:41PM +0100, Peter Dalgaard wrote: > Patrick Burns wrote: > > Douglas Bates wrote: > > > > > >> On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 8:25 AM, Duncan Murdoch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> > >> > >> > >>> On 3/3/2008 9:10 AM, Rogers, James A [PGRD Groton] wrote: > >>> > >>>> As someone of partly French heritage, I would also ask how this > >>>> distribution came to be called "Gaussian". It seems very unfair to de > >>>> Moivre, who discovered the distribution at least half a century earlier. > >>>> :-) > >>>> > >>> Just an example of Stigler's Law. > >>> > >>> > >>> > >> Taking this to a whole new level of "off topic", I wonder if Stigler's > >> Law is self-referential? That is, should Stigler's Law more correctly > >> be attributed to someone else? > >> > > > > No. If Stigler's Law were named after some prior person, > > then it wouldn't be an example of itself. > > > Only if said person actually was first to discover it, surely.
I believe that Stigler believes that he was not the first to discover Stigler's Law. -- Andrew Robinson Department of Mathematics and Statistics Tel: +61-3-8344-6410 University of Melbourne, VIC 3010 Australia Fax: +61-3-8344-4599 http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~andrewpr http://blogs.mbs.edu/fishing-in-the-bay/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.