Robert K. Merton defined eponymy as ‘the practice of affixing the name of the scientist to all or part of what he has found’. Eponymy has fascinating features and can be approached from several different angles, but only a few attempts have been made to tackle the subject lexico- graphically in science and art, and the present is the first Eponymous Dictionary of Economics.
The reader must be warned that this is a modest book, aiming at helpfulness more than erudition. We realized that economics has expanded in this sense too: there are hundreds of eponyms, and the average economist will probably be acquainted with, let alone be able to master, just a number of them. This is the void that the Dictionary is expected to fill, and in a manageable volume: delving into the problems of the sociology of science, dispelling all Mertonian multiple discoveries, and tracing the origins, on so many occasions spurious, of each eponym (cf. ‘Stigler’s Law of Eponymy’ infra), would have meant editing another book, or rather books.
A dictionary is by definition not complete, and arguably not completable. Perhaps this is even more so in our case. We fancy that we have listed most of the economic eponyms, and also some non-economic, albeit used in our profession, but we are aware of the risk of includ- ing non-material or rare entries; in these cases we have tried to select interesting eponyms, or eponyms coined by or referring to interesting thinkers. We hope that the reader will spot few mistakes in the opposite sense; that is, the exclusion of important and widely used eponyms.
The selection has been especially hard in mathematics and econometrics, much more eponymy-prone than any other field connected with economics. The low risk-aversion reader who wishes to uphold the conjecture that eponymy has numerically something to do with scientific relevance will find that the number of eponyms tends to dwindle after the 1960s; whether this means that seminal results have dwindled too is a highly debatable and, owing to the critical time dimension of eponymy, a likely unanswerable question.
In any case, we hasten to invite criticisms and suggestions in order to improve eventual future editions of the dictionary (please find below our e-mail addresses for contacts).
We would like particularly to thank all the contributors, and also other colleagues that have helped us: Emilio Albi, José María Capapé, Toni Espasa, María del Carmen Gallastegui, Cecilia Garcés, Carlos Hervés, Elena Iñarra, Emilio Lamo de Espinosa, Jaime de Salas, Rafael Salas, Vicente Salas Fumás, Cristóbal Torres and Juan Urrutia. We are grateful for the help received from Edward Elgar’s staff in all the stages of the book, and especially for Bob Pickens’ outstanding job as editor.