Most Honourable Remembrance: The Life and Work of Thomas Bayes [Hardcover]

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

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?reyss Theory of Probability. In many of these the (apparently simple) result known as Bayess Theorem played a pivotal r? 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.* Preface * Acknowledgments * Introduction * A Bayesian Genealogy * Thomas Bayes: A Life * Divine Benevolence * An Introduction to the Doctrine of Fluxions * On a Semi-convergent Series * The Essay on Chances * The Supplement to the Essay * Letters from John Ward * Miscellaneous Items * The Notebook * Memento Mori * Notes * Bibliography * Index

From the reviews:

A.I. Dale

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