User talk:Fahd Mokdad Reyes

Welcome to Wikipedia
Hi Fahd Mokdad Reyes, and welcome to Wikipedia. I just undid your well-meaning change renaming Ceva's theorem to "Al-Mu'taman–Ceva's theorem". While ideally mathematics (as a community) would give proper credit to every original discoverer of an idea, in practice that doesn't happen and all sorts of things are named after the "wrong" person. See Stigler's law of eponymy and List of misnamed theorems. The purpose of Wikipedia is, for better or worse, to describe topics as they are discussed in reliable sources, not to "set the record straight". Part of that is the guideline to "Use commonly recognizable names".

It is well worth mentioning Al-Mu'taman in the article and describe his work, with citation to reliable sources (e.g. scholarly papers about the history of mathematics). But as long as the name "Ceva's theorem" vastly predominates in the published literature, Wikipedia should primarily use that name, even if Ceva wasn't the first person to have the idea.

All the best. –jacobolus (t) 22:34, 1 February 2023 (UTC)


 * I added a note about this to List of misnamed theorems. –jacobolus (t) 01:34, 2 February 2023 (UTC)