Thomas Bayes

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Thomas Bayes published almost nothing while he was alive. What survives of his working mathematics is one essay, found among his papers after he died in 1761 and sent to the Royal Society two years later by his friend Richard Price, a fellow Presbyterian minister who thought it deserved to be read. Bayes himself was a minister first and a mathematician on the side; his one confirmed lifetime publication, issued anonymously in 1736, defended the logical rigor of Newton's calculus against an attack from Bishop Berkeley, a piece of technical apologetics for a discipline rather than for a faith. The essay Price rescued asked a genuinely new kind of question: not, given a cause, what results should we expect, but given an observed result, what should we now believe about its cause. That reversal, inverse probability, is what modern Bayesian statistics is named for, though Bayes himself never used that word and never saw his own idea generalized. It was Laplace, in France, working independently and unaware of Bayes' essay, who derived the same relationship in a more powerful, general form in 1774, and who gets equal credit, if less of the name, for the theorem the field now uses every day.