Bayes, Thomas (b. 1702, London - d. 1761, Tunbridge Wells, Kent), mathematician who first used probability inductively and established a mathematical basis for probability inference (a means of calculating, from the number of times an event has not occured, the probability that it will occur in future trials).He set down his findings on probability in "Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances" (1763), published posthumously in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
The only works he is known to have published in his lifetime are Divine Benevolence, or an Attempt to Prove That the Principal End of the Divine Providence and Government is the Happiness of His Creatures (1731) and An Introduction to the Doctrine of Fluxions, and a Defence of the Mathematicians Against the Objections of the Author of the Analyst (1736) which countered attacks by Bishop Berkeley on the logical foundations of Newton's calculus.
Here is some more information about Bayes taken from the book The Official Guide to Bunhill Fields. Bunhill Fields is a park in London, England where Bayes is buried (see The Burial Place of Bayes below).
He was a Presbyterian minister in Tunbridge Wells from 1731, son of the Rev. Joshua Bayes, a Nonconformist minister. It is thought that his election to the Royal Society might have been based on a tract of 1736 in which Bayes defended the views and philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton. A notebook of his exists, and includes a method of finding the time and place of conjunction of two planets, notes on weights and measures, a method of differentiation, and logarithms.
Thomas Bayes' contributions are immortalized by naming a fundamental proposition in probability, called Bayes Rule, after him. (The following is quoted from the Encyclopaedia Britannica)
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