[btilly]

My favorite variation was David Hilbert asking in a talk what "Hilbert Spaces" were.

In his defense, they were named after him by someone else. But it was still a funny irony.

[lonelappde]

From Hilbert's perspective, he did a lot of work that he cared about, but one random thing got his name on it out of proportion to his own sense of what his important about himself. That's disorienting.

Gauss avoided this problem by getting everything named after him.