I’m not a native speaker, so this might be a dumb question. So far, I always associated word “discover” with “something is there, someone just managed to stumble upon it while wondering around”. Thus, I find the word’s use quite strange when it comes to scientific work, especially equations —- the authors probably didn’t wonder around and invested quite a lot of work to come up with the equation.

Does it make sense to say “someone discovered an equation for X”? If not, what would be a better word?