I. J. Good

Irving John Good (1916 to 2009), born Isadore Jacob Gudak in London to a Polish Jewish family, was a British mathematician and statistician. He studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, won the Smith's Prize in 1940 and did research under G. H. Hardy and Abram Besicovitch before joining the codebreakers at Bletchley Park in 1941, where he worked with Alan Turing on German naval Enigma and later on the Fish ciphers in Max Newman's group. After the war he worked on early computers at Manchester and at GCHQ, then moved in 1967 to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University as a professor of statistics. He was known for his work on Bayesian statistics, including the Bayes factor, and in 1965 he described the idea of an intelligence explosion from an ultraintelligent machine, which later became known as the technological singularity.