The story
From Joannes Neper, the Latinized name of John Napier, a Scottish mathematician.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
neper
Today it means: A non-SI unit of the attenuation (or sometimes gain) of field and power quantities such as electronic signals; the natural logarithm of a ratio, with 1 Np (a ratio of 2.718:1) being equivalent to 8.686 dB. Full definition →