Caption: An imaginative portrait in stained glass of William of Ockham (c.1287--1347), an English scholastic philospher and Franciscan friar---he seems to be counting his hypotheses on his fingers.

William of Ockham was born in Ockham, Surrey, England---now how unlikely is that? The stained glass is in a church in Surrey---this is getting just too suspicious.

William of Ockham most memorable claim to fame is as the proponent---but NOT the absolute originator---of the philosophy of science principle Occam's razor---which can be put in various ways: e.g.,

1. "Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but---in the absence of certainty---the fewer assumptions that are made, the better" (see Wikipedia: Occam's razor).

2. "Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate (Plurality must never be posited without necessity)" which is the closest thing to an explicit statement in William of Ockham's extant writings (see Wikipedia: Occam's razor: Ockham).

3. "Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate" (Entities should NOT be multiplied without necessity)" (Wikipedia: William of Ockham: Efficient reasoning) which seems to be the version in the stained glass in the image.

4. In fact, the first formulation in the historical record of Occam's razor is by none other than The Stagirite AKA Aristotle (384--322 BCE): "We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus (other things being equal) of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses." in Posterior Analytics (see Wikipedia: Occam's razor: Formulations before William of Ockham).

5. Albert Einstein (1879--1955) made his own stab at Occam's razor: "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." (see Wikiquote: Albert Einstein: 1930s). This quote is often paraphrased more pithily as "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."