The story
Named after Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli (1654–1705), who discovered the numbers independently of and at about the same time as Japanese mathematician Seki Kōwa. The numbers first appeared as coefficients in Bernoulli's formulae for the sum of the first n positive integers, each raised to a given power. The sequence was subsequently found in numerous other contexts.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.