In The Theory That Would Not Die, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne tells the surprisingly gripping story of the theorem that pervades modern life
FEW single ideas can boast such an impressive résumé. What else could have possibly cracked the Enigma code in the second world war, predicted John F. Kennedy’s close-run win in the 1960 US presidential election, and landed a winning blow against the nefarious antics of the tobacco industry?
The secret to these successes is a humble little theorem called Bayes’s rule that allows you to assess the probability of one event from observations of an associated…
