I doubt Pournelle named it that himself. But it gets awkward to discuss something when somebody else has named it after you---I spent an hour as an undergraduate watching Shor simply call it "the factoring algorithm", trying to avoid the word "I".
Even Richard Hamming, who was famous for having said that greatness is having your name spelled in thelower-case, didn't name hamming distance; that was someone else at AT&T (Shannon, IIRC).
