Proxmire’s main (only) claim to fame was going around ridiculing research grants that sounded (to his limited brain) risible. I can’t document this, but I believe he did.
It’s easy to document Proxmire’s ridiculing research. He even created the Golden Fleece Award to do it:
Maybe you meant that it was hard to document that he found the research funny. Of course, that was in his head, but I’ll bet you can find writings or quotations from him where asserted this.
Larry Niven wrote the short story The Return of William Proxmire in 1989 to poke fun at him:
The question is whether Proxmire had the particular misunderstanding about “Lie Algebras” (it’s certainly possible that he did, but it sounds a bit too good to be true).
I don’t know if this belongs in this thread, but I will tell it anyway. There is a mathematics book that gives the usual preventative measures in set theory in order to avoid Russell’s paradox (is the set of all sets that are not members of themselves a member of itself?) and then goes on to add “This prophylaxis guarantees safe sets.”
What do you get when you cross an elephant and a mouse?
ElephantMousesine(theta).
What is the integral of d(cabin)/cabin?
Houseboat (log cabin + C)
Bumping this as I’ve been recently thinking about examples (judge if they count):
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Down Syndrome (also Down’s syndrome, researched by John Langdon Down), is characterized by (among other things) hanging eyelids.
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Alfred Nobel founded a yearly prize awarded to people who did, well, noble things (included in science).
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Felix Wankel constructed a two-phase rotary engine that is today named after him. The name roughly translates to “wobble”.
Grain-Oriented Silicon Steel (prized for its magnetic qualities) was invented by Norman P. Goss.
If we’re going to allow legal cases, Loving v. Virginia has got to be somewhere near the top of the list.