The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of

ISBN-13: 9780300188226 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 360 str.

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

Opis

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 human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years--at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information (Alan Turing's role in breaking Germany's Enigma code during World War II), and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf 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.

O autorze

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne interessiert sich für die Schnittstelle von wissenschaftlichem Fortschritt und gesellschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen und ist Autorin mehrerer Bücher über wissenschaftliche Entdeckungen und die Menschen, die dahinter stehen darunter Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries und Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World. Die Absolventin des Swarthmore College hat als Wissenschaftsjournalistin für Zeitschriften wie Science, Scientific American, Discover und The Times Higher Education Supplement geschrieben und ist mit mehreren Beiträgen in der Encyclopaedia Britannica vertreten. Sie lebt in Seattle im US-Bundesstaat Washington.