This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Pierre-Simon Laplace is a case study in how much of mathematics gets credited to whoever generalizes an idea rather than whoever finds it first. In 1774, working in France with no knowledge of an obscure essay an English minister, Thomas Bayes, had left unpublished at the time of his death thirteen years earlier, in 1761, Laplace derived a broader and more useful version of what the world now calls Bayes' theorem. He did the same thing twice more before his career was over: in 1812, in Théorie analytique des probabilites, he proved a substantially more general form of the central limit theorem than de Moivre's 1733 special case had reached, and across five volumes of Mecanique Celeste, the first two published in 1799, he rebuilt Newtonian astronomy on more secure mathematical footing, closing gaps that had worried astronomers for a century. He was not a modest man about any of this; he considered himself the best mathematician in France, and he was politically flexible enough to serve, briefly, as Napoleon's Minister of the Interior for six weeks before ending his life a marquis, a title granted in 1817 after the restoration of the monarchy Napoleon had displaced. What outlasted the politics was the mathematics: two of the eighteenth century's most durable results, in probability, both bear the fingerprints of a mind that specialized in taking someone else's good idea and making it work in general.