"This account of how a once reviled theory, Baye’s rule, came to underpin modern life is both approachable and engrossing" (Sunday Times).
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. In the first-ever account of Bayes' rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the generations-long human drama surrounding it.
McGrayne traces the rule’s discovery by an 18th century amateur mathematician through its development by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years—while practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information, such as Alan Turing's work breaking Germany's Enigma code during World War II.
McGrayne also explains how the advent of computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes' rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security. Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists, The Theory That Would Not Die is the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest controversies of all time.
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne is the author of critically-acclaimed books about scientific discoveries and the scientists who make them. Her published works include Prometheans in the Lab, Nobel Prize Women in Science, and Blue Genes and Polyester Plants. A former prize winning journalist for Scripps-Howard, Crains, Gannett, and other newspapers, McGrayne has coauthored numerous articles about physics for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. A graduate of Swarthmore College, she lives in Seattle.
Table of Contents
Preface to the Paperback Edition ix
Preface and Note to Readers xi
Acknowledgments xv
Part I Enlightenment and the Anti-Bayesian Reaction 1
1 Causes in the Air 3
2 The Man Who Did Everything 13
3 Many Doubts, Few Defenders 34
Part II Second World War Era 59
4 Bayes Goes to War 61
5 Dead and Buried Again 87
Part III The Glorious Revival 89
6 Arthur Bailey 91
7 From Tool to Theology 97
8 Jerome Cornfield, Lung Cancer, and Heart Attacks 108
9 There's Always a First Time 119
10 46,656 Varieties 129
Part IV To Prove Its Worth 137
11 Business Decisions 139
12 Who Wrote The Federalist? 154
13 The Cold Warrior 163
14 Three Mile Island 176
15 The Navy Searches 182
Part V Victory 211
16 Eureka! 213
17 Rosetta Stories 233
Epilogue 252
Appendixes 257
Dr. Fisher's Casebook 257
Applying Bayes' Rule 259
Notes 271
Glossary for Nonmathematical Readers 283
Bibliography 287
Reading List 320
Index 323
What People are Saying About This
Scott L. Zeger
Delightful ... [and] McGrayne gives a superb synopsis of the fundamental development of probability and statistics by Laplace.—Scott L. Zeger of Johns Hopkins, Physics Today
— Physics Today
Andrew I. Dale
Well known in statistical circles, Bayes’s Theorem was first given in a posthumous paper by the English clergyman Thomas Bayes in the mid-eighteenth century. McGrayne provides a fascinating account of the modern use of this result in matters as diverse as cryptography, assurance, the investigation of the connection between smoking and cancer, RAND, the identification of the author of certain papers in The Federalist, election forecasting and the search for a missing H-bomb. The general reader will enjoy her easy style and the way in which she has successfully illustrated the use of a result of prime importance in scientific work.— Andrew I. Dale, author of A History of Inverse Probability From Thomas Bayes to Karl Pearson and Most Honorable Remembrance: The Life and Work of Thomas Bayes
From the Publisher
"If you are not thinking like a Bayesian, perhaps you should be." —-New York Times Book Review
Robert E. Kass
Compelling, fast-paced reading full of lively characters and anecdotes. . . .A great story.—Robert E. Kass, Carnegie Mellon University
