There is nothing specific with this usage in French. For example, demand and offer law or law of thermodynamics have no relationship with crime and punishment either.
6 a: a statement of an order or relation of phenomena that so far as is known is invariable under the given conditions
// a law of thermodynamics
// Boyle’s law
b: a general relation proved or assumed to hold between mathematical or logical expressions
Same in Spanish:
- f. Cada una de las relaciones existentes entre los diversos elementos que intervienen en un fenómeno.
Notice that "scientific law" has a precise definition, which isn’t related to law : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law
I agree with you that it’s surprising to use the term in mathematics/statistics, but it seems to be used in several occasions, such as the "law of large numbers". I think this is acceptable in the sense of scientific law, i.e. which was discovered through experimentation.
And this definition of "scientific law" is a different concept than the "legal law".
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