Thomas Bayes was born 1702 in London and died 1761 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. He was a 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 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.
Reverend Bayes' contributions are immortalized by naming a fundamental proposition in probability, called Bayes Rule, after him.
