The Reverend Thomas Bayes, FRS: A Biography to Celebrate the Tercentenary of His Birth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thomas Bayes, from whom Bayes theorem takes its name, was probably born in 1701, so the year 2001 marked the 300th anniversary of his birth. This biography was written to celebrate this anniversary. The current sketch of his life includes his family background and education, as well as his scientific and theological work. In contrast to some, but not all, biographies of Bayes, the current biography is an attempt to cover areas beyond Bayes’ scientific work. When commenting on the writing of scientific biography, Pearson [(1978). The History of Statistics in the 17th and 18th Centuries… . Charles Griffin and Company, London] stated, “it is impossible to understand a man’s work unless you understand something of his character and unless you understand something of his environment. And his environment means the state of affairs social and political of his own age.” The intention here is to follow this general approach to biography. There is very little primary source material on Bayes and his work. For example, only three of his letters and a notebook containing some sketches of his own work, almost all unpublished, as well as notes on the work of others are known to have survived. Neither the letters nor the notebook is dated, and only one of the letters can be dated accurately from internal evidence. This biography contains new information about Bayes. In particular, among the papers of the 2nd Earl Stanhope, letters and papers of Bayes have been uncovered that previously were not known to exist. The letters indirectly confirm the centrality of Stanhope in Bayes’ election to the Royal Society. They also provide evidence that Bayes was part of a network of mathematicians initially centered on Stanhope. In addition, the letters shed light on Bayes’ work in infinite series.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".