Most Honourable Remembrance: The Life and Work of Thomas Bayes (Sources and Studies in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences)

Most Honourable Remembrance provides an in-depth discussion of the life and work of Thomas Bayes, an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister and lay mathematician who planted the seed of modern Bayesian Statistics in 1763 with his posthumous, An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances. After biographical details of Bayes' ancestors, consideration is turned to what is known of Thomas Bayes, the time in which he lived, and also the town in which he spent the major part of his professional life, Tunbridge Wells. Bayes' published works, ranging from a theological tract to one on fluxions, are reprinted in full and commented upon. Unpublished works, with commentary, are also included, special attention being given to a manuscript notebook in which some early work on a result from the above mentioned Essay may be found. The book concludes with a chapter on Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, where the Bayes family vault is still to be seen and where many prominent Nonconformists were interred. This book is the first to provide a biography and full discussion of Bayes' works and will be of interest to modern Bayesian statisticians as well as to mathematicians who may well be surprised at some of the mathematical insights shown by Bayes and which are not generally known to be attributable to him. I ?nd it impossible to write a preface to this work, without discovering a little of the enthusiasm which I have contracted from an attention to it. Joseph Priestley. The History and Present State of Electricity. It is generally considered bad form in writing, unless on matters autob- graphic,tomakeunbridleduseoftheperpendicularpronoun. Thereaderof the present book, however, may well wonder why one would want to study 1 the life and works of Thomas Bayes, ‘this strangely neglected topic’ , and it is only by a reluctant use of the ?rst person singular on the part of the author that this legitimate question can be answered. It was in the late 1960s that my interest in various aspects of subjective probability was awakened by some of the papers of I. J. (‘Jack’) Good, and this was followed by the reading of works such as Harold Je?reys’s Theory of Probability. In many of these the (apparently simple) result known as Bayes’s Theorem played a pivotal rˆ ole, and it struck me that it might be interesting to ?nd out a bit more about Thomas Bayes himself. In trying to satisfy this curiosity in spasmodic periods over many years I discovered that little information seemed to be available. Writings by John D. front-matter......Page 1 1Introduction......Page 20 2A Bayesian Genealogy......Page 25 3Thomas Bayes a life......Page 56 4Divine Benevolence......Page 120 5An Introduction to the Doctrine of Fluxions......Page 201 6On a Semi-convergent Series......Page 272 7The Essay on Chances......Page 277 8The Supplement to the Essay......Page 355 9Letters from John Ward......Page 389 10Miscellaneous Items......Page 403 11The Notebook......Page 439 12Memento mori......Page 518 back-matter......Page 545 "Interesting and useful as all this will be for anyone interested in knowing more about Bayes, this is just part of the riches contained in this book . . . Beyond doubt this book is a work of the highest quality in terms of the scholarship it displays, and should be regarded as a must for every mathematical library." --MAA ONLINE "This book is the first to provide a biography and full discussion of Bayes's works and will be of interest to modern Bayesian statisticians as well as to mathematicians who may well be surprised at some of the mathematical insights shown by Bayes and that are not generally known to be attributable to him."--Jacket In the introduction to the 1886 edition of Francis Bacon's Essays Storr and Gibson note that 'The guiding principles of Bacon's philosophy are utility and progress' [p. xi].