Book review: The Theory That Would Not Die ZDNet

A few months ago, Autonomy founder and CEO Mike Lynch sold his company to HP for £7.1 billion. Back in 2000, when he had just become Britain's first software billionaire, Lynch gave an interview in which he talked about perception and explained how he built his company. It was based, he said, on the ideas of a little-known 18th-century clergyman called Thomas Bayes. That was my introduction to Thomas Bayes, whose ideas have been used to solve many intractable problems, a number of which Sharon Bertsch McGrayne studies in depth in The Theory That Would Not Die. In the last ten years, Bayes has become famous, and few working in the field of probability theory, computer intelligence or mathematics can have failed to have come into contact with his rule.