Bayes

Thomas Bayes

Born: 1702 in London, England
Died: 17 April 1761 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England

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Bayes was a clergyman, a Nonconformist minister, in Tunbridge Wells 35 miles southeast of London. He made important contributions to the theory of probability.

Bayes set out his theory of probability in Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1764. His conclusions were accepted by Laplace in a 1781 memoir, rediscovered by Condorcet (as Laplace mentions), and remained unchallenged until Boole questioned them in the Laws of Thought . Since then Bayes' techniques have been subject to controversy.

Bayes also wrote an article An Introduction to the Doctrine of Fluxions, and a Defence of the Mathematicians Against the Objections of the Author of The Analyst (1736) attacking Berkeley for his attack on the logical foundations of the calculus.

Bayes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1742 despite the fact that at that time he had no published works on mathematics, indeed none were published in his lifetime.

References:

  1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  2. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. L J Savage, The foundations of statistics (New York-London, 1954).
  4. S M Stigler, The History of Statistics. The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Cambridge, Mass.-London, 1986), 88- .
  5. G A Barnard, Thomas Bayes - a biographical note, Biometrika 45 (1958), 293-315. 
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JOC/EFR February 1996