The Reverend Thomas Bayes, FRS: A Biography to Celebrate the Tercentenary of His Birth

Abstract

Thomas Bayes, from whom Bayes theorem takes its name, was probably born in 1701, so the year 2001 marked the 300th anniversary of his birth. This biography was written to celebrate this anniversary. The current sketch of his life includes his family background and education, as well as his scientific and theological work. In contrast to some, but not all, biographies of Bayes, the current biography is an attempt to cover areas beyond Bayes' scientific work. When commenting on the writing of scientific biography, Pearson [(1978). The History of Statistics in the 17th and 18th Centuries. . .. Charles Griffin and Company, London] stated, "it is impossible to understand a man's work unless you understand something of his character and unless you understand something of his environment. And his environment means the state of affairs social and political of his own age." The intention here is to follow this general approach to biography.There is very little primary source material on Bayes and his work. For example, only three of his letters and a notebook containing some sketches of his own work, almost all unpublished, as well as notes on the work of others are known to have survived. Neither the letters nor the notebook is dated, and only one of the letters can be dated accurately from internal evidence. This biography contains new information about Bayes. In particular, among the papers of the 2nd Earl Stanhope, letters and papers of Bayes have been uncovered that previously were not known to exist. The letters indirectly confirm the centrality of Stanhope in Bayes' election to the Royal Society. They also provide evidence that Bayes was part of a network of mathematicians initially centered on Stanhope. In addition, the letters shed light on Bayes' work in infinite series.

The Resistible Rise of Bayesian Thinking in Management

“…It seems more likely that Bayes' interest in the problem of inverse probability came from his readings of Newton's work on the causes of gravity, or as an answer to Hume's philosophical essay (Bellhouse, 2004;McGrayne, 2012;Stigler, 2013). 2 The political or critical nature of ANT has been debated in recent years in organization theory, notably by Whittle and Spicer (2008), who argued that early ANT work did not focus sufficiently on politics and power.…”

Book Review: Most honorable remembrance: The life and works of Thomas Bayes

“…First, there is a wonderful paper by David Bellhouse (2003) [2]. Bellhouse has long been interested in Bayes and uncovered the manuscripts in the Stanhope collection.…”

On Some Recently Discovered Manuscripts of Thomas Bayes

“…For example, Barnard (1958) suggested that Bayes had learned his mathematics, and implicitly probability, from de Moivre, who gave lectures or lessons in a London coffee house. This conjecture was made before it was discovered that Bayes had attended the University of Edinburgh (see, for example, Dale, 1991, andBellhouse, 2002) and had studied mathematics with James Gregory, nephew of the more eminent mathematician of the same name, in the early 1720s. Stigler (1986) more reasonably has argued that Bayes became interested in probability after reading Simpson (1755), after which he provided comments on Simpson's paper to John Canton.…”

“…Like his work in probability, his only publication in this area was published posthumously (Bayes, 1763b). Several biographies or biographical sketches of Bayes have been written, the most recent being Bellhouse (2002).…”