List of scientific constants named after people

This is a list of physical and mathematical constants named after people.^[1] Eponymous constants and their influence on scientific citations have been discussed in the literature.^{[2][lower-alpha 1]}

• Archimedes' constant (π, pi) – Archimedes
• Avogadro's number – Amedeo Avogadro
• Bohr magneton – Niels Bohr
• Bohr radius – Niels Bohr
• Boltzmann constant – Ludwig Boltzmann
• Cabibbo angle – Nicola Cabibbo
• Chaitin's constant – Gregory Chaitin
• Chandrasekhar limit – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
• Copeland–Erdős constant – Paul Erdős and Peter Borwein
• Coulomb's constant (electric force constant, electrostatic constant, ke ) – Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
• Eddington number – Arthur Stanley Eddington
• Embree–Trefethen constant
• Erdős–Borwein constant
• Euler–Mascheroni constant ($\gamma$) – Leonhard Euler and Lorenzo Mascheroni
• Euler's number ($e$) – Leonhard Euler
• Faraday constant – Michael Faraday
• Feigenbaum constants – Mitchell Feigenbaum
• Graham's number – Ronald Graham
• Hartree energy – Douglas Hartree
• Hubble's constant – Edwin Hubble
• Josephson constant – Brian David Josephson
• Kerr constant – John Kerr
• Khinchin's constant – Aleksandr Khinchin
• Landau–Ramanujan constant – Edmund Landau and Srinivasa Ramanujan
• Legendre's constant (one, 1) – Adrien-Marie Legendre
• Loschmidt constant – Johann Josef Loschmidt
• Ludolphsche Zahl – Ludolph van Ceulen
• Mean of Phidias (golden ratio, $\phi$, phi) – Phidias
• Meissel–Mertens constant
• Moser's number
• Newton's constant (gravitational constant, $G$) – Sir Isaac Newton
• Planck constant ($h$) – Max Planck

• Reduced Planck constant or Dirac constant ($h$-bar, ħ) – Max Planck, Paul Dirac

• Ramanujan–Soldner constant – Srinivasa Ramanujan and Johann Georg von Soldner
• Rydberg constant – Johannes Rydberg
• Sackur–Tetrode constant – Otto Sackur and Hugo Tetrode
• Sierpiński's constant – Wacław Sierpiński
• Skewes' number – Stanley Skewes
• Stefan–Boltzmann constant – Jožef Stefan and Ludwig Boltzmann
• Theodorus' constant (√3 ≅ ±1.732050807568877...) – Theodorus of Cyrene
• Viswanath's constant – Divakar Viswanath
• von Klitzing constant – Klaus von Klitzing
• Wien displacement law constant – Wilhelm Wien

See also

• List of eponymous laws, for a list of laws named after people
• List of scientific laws named after people
• List of scientists whose names are used in physical constants

Notes and references

1. The article addresses the major premise in the argument against the Ortega hypothesis: that citation counts fairly reflect the importance of scientific contributions. It presents the results of a study of eponyms in scientific literature. The result is that usually when a journal paper refers to a unit, constant, technique, device, etc. that is named after a scientist (an "eponym"), that paper will not cite the person who is the namesake of the unit, constant, technique, etc. Early papers cite it more; later papers cite it less.

1. "Reflections on the Natural History of Eponymy and Scientific Law", Donald deB. Beaver, Social Studies of Science, volume 6, number 1 (February 1976), pages 89–98. JSTOR 284787
2. Non-indexed Eponymal Citedness (NIEC): First Fact-finding Examination of a Phenomenon of Scientific Literature; Endre Száva-Kováts. "Journal of Information Science;" (1994); 20:55 doi:10.1177/016555159402000107