Wolfram is a brilliant, egotistical, narcissistic credit hog. The history of science is littered with them. Some of the greatest discoveries of mankind are credited to the wrong people.
Can you give examples? I'm genuinely interested. Rosalind Franklin and DNA is about the only 'greatest discovery' I know of where I think credit wasn't given where it was due.
Also, SW hasn't gotten anywhere near a 'greatest discovery', so I'm not sure the comparison is valid.
Everyone likes to talk about the immortality that comes with proving an important mathematical result, but it's rarely that easy:
The first publication on the Mobius strip was written by a guy named Listing, who did the same work as Mobius at the same time. I have to warn you that googling "Listing Strip" is slightly NSFW.
Kalman was only the popularizer of the Kalman Filter.
Grassman, who invented vector spaces and developed a lot of linear algebra, only got credit posthumously.
Some people, like Fourier, only inspired the theory named for them. Modern theory is so much more general than classical theory that entire careers can be built by translating an old mathematical idea to a new domain.
Sometimes, a new idea gets labeled as an extension to an existing idea if it so much as resembles an old idea. For example, the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation was Bellman's work. This is dangerous if you're after immortality -- there are very few ideas in math that aren't even slightly hinted at in the works of: Euler, Gauss, Jacobi, Hamilton, Lagrange, Laplace, etc.
Sometimes, though, the new guys can usurp the old. When set theory being laid down as the core idea in all of mathematics, the mathematicians who reformulated ideas in rigorous set-theoretic language often got the new names. That's why we now have the Haar Measure instead of the Hurwitz Invariant Integral.
