Year: 2012
Type: book-review
Abstract: In the early 1730s Thomas Bayes (1701?-1761) was appointed minister at the Presbyterian Meeting House on Mount Sion, Tunbridge Wells, a town that had developed around the restorative chalybeate spring discovered there by Dudley, Lord North, in 1606.Apparently not one who was a particularly popular preacher, Bayes would be recalled today, if at all, merely as one of the minor clergy of eighteenth-century England, who also dabbled in mathematics.How is it, then, that Roger Farthing, author of an excellent history of Mount Sion, could describe Bayes as "to my mind, the greatest man to have lived in Tunbridge Wells" ([5, p. 167])?The answer is fairly simple: Bayesian statistics.In 1763 Richard Price forwarded to the Royal Society of London an essay by Bayes [2] in which the following problem was addressed:Given the number of times in which an unknown event has happened and failed: Required the chance that the probability of its happening in a single trial lies between any two degrees of probability that can be named.
DOI: 10.1090/noti839
Author: Andrew I. Dale
Institution: University of KwaZulu-Natal
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2316452789