@ColinTheMathmo
Re: edits: It's great that you're modest and all that, but IMHO you need not hesitate.
All these laws are things people know in some form before they were articulated; that's *why* they catch on.
Murphy's Law, for instance, clearly captures a feeling and observation that goes back to the beginning of time.
(The Universe *is* perverse)
@dougmerritt I hear what you say ...
Even so, it won't catch on unless *other* people use it. I remember the story about John H Conway who actually wanted to name the Finite Simple Groups that he discovered after himself, but needed a trick to get other people to call the "The Conway Groups".
So he called them "Point Zero", to be written as ".0", and figured that people would give up called them that and refer to them as "The Conway Groups".
Then someone, seeing ".0" started to call them "Dotto" ... which caught on.
Not sure this story is relevant, except in so far as getting other people to call something after oneself is tricky.
@ColinTheMathmo
> getting other people to call something after oneself is tricky.
"Colin's Law"! 😆
Aug 8, 2026, 7:34 PMThe Newton-Leibniz theorem also came to mind as a related case.
By the way, is Usenet extremely ethical now?