To get tenure your work needs to have a clear impact. Impact can't be captured by simple rules such as publish at least x papers in a high impact journal. Standards differ too much between different research disciplines, so impact must be judged on a case by case basis.
Stronger cases for impact can be made more concisely. If you have a widely used equation named after you then likely you will "automatically" get tenure - no need to prepare a lengthy tenure dossier, since it is a clear cut case of lasting impact.
While getting an equation named after you might seem like a daunting task, there are actually many examples of named new equations, models, or algorithms that have been adopted relatively recently. These examples give hints as to how you should strategise your own research directions if you want to use this method to secure tenure!
To start, the Lugiato-Lefever equation used to model Kerr frequency combs was first formulated in 1987. The first reference to it by others as the Lugiato-Lefever equation I can find is in 1997, after the original paper had already accumulated about 150 citations - a relatively long time.
Quantum algorithms
are often named after their creators: Shor's algorithm, Grover search,
and HHL immediately come to mind. But others are not: the quantum
approximate optimization algorithm, quantum phase estimation, and
quantum signal processing, to name a few.
The field of topological insulators provides numerous examples:
- Immediately after Haldane's key 1988 paper was published, others referred to it as "a model introduced by Haldane" and "Haldane's model". This continued for a long time, even including the seminal quantum spin Hall effect paper. The first reference to it as "the Haldane model" was the 2005 PRL paper "Orbital Magnetization in Periodic Insulators". A few papers followed this phrasing in the next two years, with it becoming widely adopted from 2008.
- The Kane-Mele model that started the field of topological insulators was named that way by others within a year and this name quickly stuck.
- More recently, the first model of a quadrupole topological phase proposed by Benalcazar, Bernevig, and Hughes in 2017 started being called the Benalcazar-Bernevig-Hughes model in 2019.
- In topological photonics we have the "Wu-Hu model" proposed in 2015, which effectively opened up the study of topological phases using all-dielectric photonic crystals. For many years this model lacked a catchy name, with many papers referring to shrunken/expanded photonic crystal designs. Then in 2023 something changed - 6 papers, all by different authors, started calling it the Wu-Hu model and now this name is being widely used!
Why do some equations or models get named after their creators and others don't? What makes a named equation special?
The examples taken from topological insulators relate to widely-used prototypical models. The models might lack rigorous justification from first principles or experimental feasibility, but they embody some phenomenon of interest and are simple enough to understand, boiling a mysterious effect down to its key ingredients - the heart of physics.
Names are used to allow specialists to communicate some complicated concept more concisely. Thus, naming after authors is less popular when a simple and sufficiently descriptive name exists. For example, "Berry phase" and "geometric phase" are both widely used. Similarly, if there are too many authors it becomes too cumbersome to refer to the model by their names. TKNN formula (from 4 authors' surnames) is widely used, but examples with more than four authors seem rare.
Finally, while it can help if a leading authority in the field starts using the name first, in all of the above examples the impact came before the name. But once the name is coined it becomes a lot more compelling for authors to work with your model, amplifying its impact.
