Biography for one statistician. Mathematics & Economics Coursework

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Biography for One Statistician: Thomas Bayes
Thomas Bayes (1702-1761) is a British mathematician born and buried in London. Educated at the University of Edinburgh and ordained a priest in 1720. Bayes carried out pastoral work in the church of Tunbridge Wells where he lived all his life (Bellhouse 6-7). Bayes work on probability theory gave rise to the Bayesian approach and became one of his most public contributions in mathematics and statistics even after his death. Thomas Bayes studied the problem of determining the probability of causes through the observed effects. The theorem that bears his name is the probability of an event that is presented as the sum of several mutually exclusive events. Religious background, family background, early education, and his experiences as a fellow of Royal Society provide insights on the work of Thomas Bayes.
Bayes received private tutoring, and because of his family religious beliefs, he could not enroll in the most prestigious universities in England and instead chose to study logic and theology at Edinburg in Scotland. While religion still played an important part in his life, he continued his study of mathematics. For instance, his 1763 work “Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances” contributed towards the development of modern statistics from the 18th century. This is the basis of Bayesian statistics, where the probability is calculated depending on the previous estimate of the probability and additional evidence available.
In 1742, Bayes was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society had not published any scientific work. He did not publish any work in his life with his name. It was after his death when his friend Richard Price sent the Royal Society his work on probability theory. Bellhouse (17-18) argued that Bayes was likely elected to the Royal Society when Stanhope, a promoter of mathematics who had contacts at the Royal Society came into contact with Bayes and his work “The Doctrine of Fluxions (Bayes, 1736)” and he then vouched for him.
Despite behaving not published some of his works Bayes’ manuscripts were in Stanhope’s collection. Even as early as 1747 Bayes had addressed the derivation of Stirling’s approximation to factorials, but the result remained unpublished, and the work was distributed to his close friends (Bellhouse 41).
One of the first ways to use of Bayes techniques is inductive probability and establishing a mathematical basis for probabilistic inference. Bayesian analysis or inference now commonly called Bayesian to refer to the inferential methods based directly on Bayes Theorem (Fienberg 1). Bayes wor...