Date: Nov 29, 1997 12:19 AM
Author: Jim Balter
Subject: Re: most famous codiscoverer gets credit (Matthew Effect) [was: This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 112)]
Gerry Myerson wrote:
> In article <firstname.lastname@example.org>, email@example.com wrote:
> > There are occasions when the anti-Matthews effect occurs.
> Pell's equation is an example of this, named after Pell because there was
> already too much stuff named after Fermat...
And then there's the Berry Paradox, discovered by Russell but named
after his librarian because "Russell's Paradox" was already taken.
The smallest number that cannot be uniquely described in fewer than a
million words has just been uniquely described in far less than a
million words; Gregory Chaitin's Algorthmic Complexity Theory is
based upon using the Berry Paradox to establish information-theoretic
incompleteness much as Godel used the Liar Paradox to establish
<J Q B>