A group of mathematicians operating under a pseudonym is basically the exact opposite of a single mathematician naming everything after himself.

Only until the pseudonym becomes famous and it's basically the same thing.

The difference is capitalism.

The name has some prestige, but it would be difficult for "Nicolas Bourbaki" to leverage "his" mathematical fame to accumulate wealth in a way that allows "him" to advocate a particularly fringe theory of, say, virology.

Wolfram, on the other hand, can leverage Mathematica to get rich, and use his riches to continue to push NKS, despite zero (or less) interest from physicists.

Nobody has to listen to Wolfram. Close his graphomaniac blog and forget about him.

On the other hand, academic credit (not merit) will get you much further than money in many cases - and the lack of it (while not lacking merit) is a serious impediment on the progress of many scientific projects.

The difference? Socialism. Wolfram uses his own taxed income to further his goals, while meritless scientists use the broken system of academia and the income from taxes (that should've been used to further real science) to accomplish theirs.

Bourbaki's academic credit doesn't get Bourbaki grants.

It does. The people assigning grants know and will take it into account.

The joke is that the discoveries attributed to “Stephen Wolfram” are actually the work of multiple people, none of whom are actually named that.

I mean, I studied maths and physics at uni. My recollection is that science is littered with things named after specific people when in actual fact multiple people put in hours and hours of work to making these discoveries. But only one name gets slapped on it.

‘Maxwell’s’ equations are a great example. Calculus is also a prime example (d/dx f(x) vs f’(x)). I’m pretty sure Gauss was a fantastic mathematician, but too much is named after him and a lot of recognition taken away from others who greatly contributed.

It’s not a new phenomena. I don’t think it’s great for things to be named after specific people at any point history, but it’s happened before and it’ll continue to happen.

The saying goes that a mathematical theorem is named after the first person to discover it after Gauss.

I heard that said of euler.

John von Nuemann comes to mind, Edison of course...

seems history is written by the patent submitters

And Charles Darwin (about 600 years late): https://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/resources/timeline...

> John von Nuemann

Are you saying that some of the work attributed to Neumann was not his? Are there any examples?

The famed "von Neumann" architecture refers to a write-up he was asked to do to update the Army on progress on the ENIAC. He didn't even intend to publish it, the ENIAC was classified, it was Goldstine that published it with their names on it. See the "controversies" section here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Draft_of_a_Report_on_t...

The book "Pioneer Programmer" by ENIAC programmer Jean Jennings Bartik goes into detail about the egos at play in taking credit for the work done by Eckert & Mauchly.

Lol, welcome to science. If you really think the head author of a paper did the work, or that any of the authors did the majority of the work, or that the authors collectively did the majority of the work, or that who did the work is also mentioned as an author - you're in for a huge surprise.