Thomas Bayes: a biographical sketch

Abstract

Most authors of papers or articles devoted to biographical comments on Thomas Bayes preface their remarks with an Apologia for the paucity of pertinent particulars. In 1860 we find de Morgan publishing a request in Notes and Queries for more information on Bayes, listing, in no more than a few paragraphs, all that he knows. In 1974 Maistrov, in what was probably to that date the most complete and authoritative1 history of probability theory since Todhunter’s classic of 1865, bemoans the fact that biographical data concerning Bayes is scarce and often misleading… Even in the “Great Soviet Encyclopedia” (BSE) there is no mention of his birthdate and the date of his death is given incorrectly as 1763. [pp.87–88] But no national shame need be felt by the Soviets on this account: the Dictionary of National Biography (ed. L. Stephen), though devoting space to Thomas’s father, is stubbornly silent on the perhaps more illustrious son2, while the Encyclopaedia Britannica has apparently3 no entry under “Bayes” until the fourteenth edition, post 1958, where a brief biographical note may be found. The only earlier work of general reference to contain a biographical note on Thomas Bayes, as far as has been ascertained, is J.F. Waller’s edition of the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography4 of 1865.