Thomas Bayes

Reverend Thomas Bayes was an English clergyman who died in 1761 in Tunbridge Wells, south east of London at the age of 60, after having published only three works. (It would have been unlikely that he would have obtained tenure at a modern American University!) His first publication, entitled "Divine Benevolence, or an attempt to prove that the principal end of the Divine Providence and Government is the happiness of its creatures", was consigned to oblivion. However the third, which was published posthumously, founded a whole approach to statistics known as Bayesian Statistics. This paper, entitled, "An essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances, described what is now known as Bayes' rule or theorem.