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Thomas Bayes
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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.
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1. Thomas Bayes (MacTutor)
MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St AndrewsQuick Info summaryQuote, Quick Info summary
Thomas Bayes was an English clergyman who set out his theory of probability in 1764. His conclusions were accepted by Laplace in 1781, rediscovered by Condorcet, and remained unchallenged until Boole questioned them. Since then Bayes' techniques have been subject to controversy.
An Essay towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances
Thomas Bayes, communicated by Richard Price, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1763
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