Thomas Bayes

Thomas Bayes was born around 1702, probably in London, and died on 7 April 1761 in Tunbridge Wells, England. A Presbyterian minister, he served the Mount Sion Chapel in Tunbridge Wells and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1742, though not for the work he is remembered for today. Among his papers after his death was an essay setting out a rule for calculating the probability of a cause from an observed effect, a rule now called Bayes' theorem. His friend Richard Price prepared it for publication and read it to the Royal Society, and it appeared as An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances in 1763. The essay attracted little attention for well over a century; in the twentieth century it became the foundation of Bayesian statistics, an entire school of inference standing alongside the frequentist methods later developed by Fisher, Neyman and Egon Pearson.