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Nah, this is pretty common. Like if you read Maxwell 1865, it looks nothing like the modern presentation of Maxwell’s equations. It’s not because people are lying, it’s because the underlying idea has been substantially cleaned up from the first person to stumble upon it.
Another example: calculus didn’t even have any rigorous foundation until a century after Newton, when Cauchy finally came up with the modern epsilon-delta thing we teach everyone today.
Modern presentation is only wrong in the sense that it’s biased towards presenting the polished ideas in their final state, while attributing this to the original thinkers, when in reality, there’s usually a big story between "guy who originally thought of this" and "what we’re actually presenting to you in class today."
The Gaussian distribution is another example. The distribution itself was proposed by Gauss, yes, but the justification for why this distribution is indeed the peremptory-correct distribution was done by Laplace (who had proposed several prior attempts at his own normal distribution!) The logic of why the normal distribution is the normal distribution—what we now know as the Central Limit Theorem—is the meat of the story, and yet Laplace’s name is merely a footnote to anyone except math nerds.
Yeah, and furthermore for calculus we all still pay the price because limits are honestly only taught as a holdover from that attempt to prove to other math people calculus was legit. You don't actually need an understanding of limits at all for nearly anything you do in calculus, but the big standardized tests include it so everyone is forced to teach it anyways.
Also IIRC neither Laplace nor Gauss were the actual very first dudes to propose the Normal distribution, that was actually de Moivre as a binomial approximation (who ALSO got robbed of Poisson distribution naming rights). Though Laplace was doubly a reputational victim, since he furthermore got robbed of credit somewhat because he was the dude who did most of the work with Bayesian statistics and inference much like he did for calculus. Sir Bayes didn't even publish his stuff himself. And Laplace did most of the cleanup work for Newton's gravitational theories.
But yeah, naming in math and science is a bit of a mess.
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