I recently found out Geoffrey Hinton's great-great-grandfather is George Boole, one of the fathers of modern computer science. Like... omg? THEN his other grand^3-father was a famous surgeon and author, who sired a famous mathematician. Then his Father was a famous entomologist; uncle, a famous economist; aunt, a famous physicist. AND THEN he's still related to Everest. YES! THAT EVEREST! OF MOUNT FAME!
Besides how absolutely BONKERS this family lineage is, even without the fact that he himself is a legend of his own right, arguably the most important figure of his bunch, I still can't get over the fact that there was a guy named Everest, and then we named the mountain after him. Like what?
Besides the whitewashing of a mountain that be named after its local culture, how marvelously peculiar it is when we name something after someone. Like General Relativity isn't called Einstein's theory, but we have no shortage of Euler's theorem. Or even an Odyssey?
In my research for this post, I found Stigler's Law of Eponymy. It's basically the idea that no scientific discovery is named after its orignal discoverer. In Stigler's original essay, he found out about Robert K Merton's prior discussion of this principle. What a cute way to guarantee someone HAS to name something after him. If he left that door open, he'd obviously open himself up to getting it named after someone else lol