Category: Ideas

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
– Albert Einstein

We’ve all heard that quote. At meetings. In self-help books. On motivational posters in office break rooms. It exemplifies Einstein’s legendary cut-to-the-chase brilliance.

The only problem is, Einstein didn’t say it.

As far as I can tell, the quote first appeared in a Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet in the early 1980s. Einstein died in 1955 without mentioning anything remotely close to it in anything he’d ever written or said.

And yet, the misattribution stuck. Why? Because it feels like something Einstein would have said. Like Churchill, Lincoln, or Mark Twain, Einstein has become a kind of general-purpose intellectual that we can attribute our cleverest, pithiest thoughts to, whether he said them or not.

This misattribution happens all the time. So often, in fact, that there’s a name for it.

Actually, there are several.

Stigler’s Law of Eponymy

In 1980, University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler gave this phenomenon a name: Stigler’s Law of Eponymy. It states that “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”¹

The best part? Stigler didn’t even claim to have discovered it. He credited the idea to someone else—sociologist Robert K. Merton. In other words, the law named after Stigler was… not discovered by Stigler. The law proves itself. Here’s what he wrote in the paper:

If there is an idea in this paper that is not at least implicit in Merton’s The Sociology of Science, it is either a happy accident or a likely error. Rather I have, in the Mertonian tradition of the self-confirming hypothesis, attempted to frame the self-proving theorem.

Stigler’s Law of Eponomy

But it’s not just a clever academic joke. Stigler’s Law points to something more systemic: we don’t just forget who discovered what—we misremember it. Over time, we start attaching credit to the loudest name, not the first one.

In the original paper, Stigler and others have documented example after example:

• Halley’s Comet? Observed by ancient Chinese and Babylonian astronomers. Halley just did the math.
• Newton’s First Law of Motion – Better known as inertia, it was described by Galileo decades before Newton refined and popularized it.
• Fibonacci sequence – Long before Leonardo of Pisa wrote about it, Indian mathematicians like Pingala and Virahanka had described it in the context of Sanskrit poetry and combinatorics.

Fame creates its own kind of gravity and inertia. Once someone becomes famous enough, many other discoveries are attached to them.

The Matthew Effect

Now let’s look at Robert Merton—the person Stigler credited. Back in 1968, Merton gave this bias its own name: the Matthew Effect, based on a verse in the Gospel of Matthew, “For to everyone who has, more will be given…”

In the world of science, that means prominent researchers get more recognition, more funding, more citations—even when the original insight came from someone else. It’s not always malicious. Sometimes, people just assume the famous name must be behind the breakthrough. Other times, the lesser-known researcher gets buried in the footnotes.

The Matthew Effect isn’t limited to academia. It shows up in:

• Publishing, where established authors get bigger advances regardless of quality.
• Tech, where investors back founders who’ve “done it before.”
• Education, where early reading success snowballs into long-term achievement.

It’s a feedback loop. Once you’re seen as successful, you’re more likely to be treated as successful. And then the cycle repeats.

Churchillian Drift

If Stigler’s Law and the Matthew Effect explain why discoveries get mislabeled, Churchillian Drift explains why quotes get misattributed—especially to famous people like Winston Churchill.

Coined by British broadcaster and quote sleuth Nigel Rees, Churchillian Drift describes how pithy or profound lines migrate toward famous names over time. If a quote sounds wise and ancient, we give it to Confucius. If it’s cynical and funny, it goes to Mark Twain. If it’s about strategy or war, it’s Sun Tzu. And if it’s about perseverance, logic, or nobility? Einstein gets the nod.

It’s branding by attribution. The quote becomes “better” if we imagine a titan of history saying it.

So What Do We Do With This?

At the surface, it’s just cultural laziness—there are only so many “famous” people in the public’s mental Rolodex, so we assign them everything. But it’s also more subtle and damaging: it reinforces the idea that only a handful of people in history are worth listening to.

This doesn’t just happen with quotes. It happens with scientific discoveries, artistic breakthroughs, and even entire branches of mathematics. As I wrote in The Fibonacci Sequence, Brought to You by Fibonacci (and Absolutely No One Else), history often remembers the person who popularized an idea, not the person who actually created it. The result? We get a distorted picture of how progress really happens.

The next time you hear a clever quote—or a “fact” about who discovered what—you don’t have to just nod along. You can check. Quote Investigator, run by Garson O’Toole, traces famous lines back to their earliest appearances. That’s where I found the true story of the Einstein quote.

You might find that the quote in your PowerPoint isn’t from Churchill, but from an obscure 19th-century pamphlet. Or that the mathematical sequence you love owes more to India than to Fibonacci.

Finding the truth behind these attributions means going beyond the headline version of history—the one where “Einstein was smart” and “Newton discovered everything.” What you get instead is the messy, collaborative, and far more human version of how ideas actually spread.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy ↩︎