I’m watching a program about black holes, and the the Schwarzschild radius came up. I had heard about it, but never was clear if it was named after a person, so I looked it up, and indeed it’s named after the physicist Karl Schwarzschild. Now “Schwarzschild” in German means “black shield”, so it’s a fitting name for the phenomenon it describes. Are there other examples of such a coincidence?
Moore’s Law is the best I can come up with.
But it would have been great if a 5-year-old Emmy Noether had assisted Mitchelson & Morley.
I don’t get it. Could you elaborate?
:smack: I elaborated about that about a week ago and had already forgotten this thread, but 5 minutes after posting above I got it: no ether. 
Hotelling’s Law (Hotelling's law - Wikipedia ) among other things explains why hotels are likely to cluster in one area.
The best I can come up with is something called the Killing form (named after Wilhelm Killing) that vanishes (dies) on a nilpotent Lie algebra. And, BTW, Lie algebras have nothing to do with lying (as Sen. Wm. Proxmire thought) but named after Sophus Lie (pronounced like Lee).
Only remotely on-topic here but:
Why didn’t Lie characterize commutative groups?
– Because he wasn’t Abel.
The Poynting vector (after John Henry Poynting) points in the direction of propagation of an electromagnetic wave.
When I first learned of the Auger effect, I thought its name had something to do with the idea of an electron drilling down to a lower shell, like an auger drilling through wood. Turns out it’s named for a guy called Pierre Victor Auger.
Probably not what you had in mind, but the Child Ballads are so called because they were collected by Francis James Child. For years I thought they were called that because they were for children. After all, they do contain many of the same motifs as fairy tales.
Did Proxmire really think Lie algebras were about lying?
The Poynting Vector points in the direction of energy travel in electromagnetic radiation. It was discovered by John Henry Poynting.
This is cool. I’ve always noticed the effect but never knew it had a name. And talk about what seems to be nominative determinism.
Does Alzheimer’s Disease count? Sometimes people seem to think it’s called “Old Timer’s Disease”.
A quick glance at a list of laws named after people reveals Heap’s Law which says that as a corpus of text grows there will be a diminishing return of new distinct words (the corpus could be poetically called a “heap” of words.)
A joke that only works when written as Lie is pronounced Lee and Abel pronounced AH bel
SADS: Seasonal Affective Disorder Syndrome. AKA getting depressed in winter.
“Poynting Vector” was what I first thought of, too. Lots of TAs and Professors made jokes about it.
Not really what you’re looking for, but in 1948 George Gamow’s had his name on his student Ralph Alpher’s paper on Physical Cosmology, and persuaded physicist Hans Bethe (who had nothing to do with the work) to add his name to the paper so that it could be the “Alpher, Bethe, Gamow” paper (suggesting Alpha Beta, Gamma):
Not coincidental at all. And not related to greek letters, either.
When Wayne Knox was a new professort in Rochester, he persuaded his father Bob Knox (also a professor at Rochester) to add his name to a spurious “paper” about creating a “zero femtosecond pulse”, along with Richard Zare and a guy who he looked up to find an appropriate match, J.F. Hoose, so that they could publish the
Knox, Knox, Hoose, Zare paper
This may not be coincidence - people come up with appropriate acronyms all the time.
Michaelson and Morley’s experiment to measure speed in the ether proved that there is no ether.
Yeah, as mentioned above I got the joke about 5 minutes after asking. I was familiar with the Michaelson Morley experiment, but parsed Emmy Noether’s name like the German I am, as Nöther, so I didn’t get it first.
Stop, you’re Killing me.