Bayes’ Rule: The Theory That Would Not Die
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Monday, October 17, 2011
4:30 pm, Porter Hall 100 (Gregg Hall)
From spam filters and machine translation to the drones over bin Laden’s compound, Bayes’ rule pervades modern life. Thomas Bayes and Pierre-Simon Laplace discovered the rule roughly 250 years ago but, for most of the 20th century, it was deeply controversial, almost taboo among academics and theoreticians. My talk will range over the history of Bayes’ rule, highlighting Alan Turing who decrypted the German Enigma code and Jerome Cornfield of NIH and George Washington University who used Bayes to establish smoking as a cause of lung cancer and high cholesterol as a cause of cardiovascular disease. The talk will be based on my recent book, The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines & Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy (Yale University Press).
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne is also the author of Nobel Prize Women in Science, biographies of 15 leading scientists, published by the National Academy Press. Her book, Prometheans in the Lab, a history of pollution and the chemical industry, was published by McGraw-Hill.
McGrayne is a former newspaper reporter and co-author of the Atom and Electricity & Magnetism articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She has been a panelist on NPR’s Science Friday, and her work has been featured on Charley Rose. She has written for Scientific American, APS News, Science, Isis, the Times Higher Education Supplement, and other publications. Her books have been reviewed by Nature, Chemical & Engineering News, New Scientist, JAMA, Physics Today, Scientific American, Science Teacher, American Journal of Physics, Physics Teacher, Popular Mechanics, and others. She has spoken at numerous universities, research institutions, and businesses here and in Europe. She lives in Seattle. Her webpage is at McGrayne.com.
Read the interview with Sharon McGrayne that ran in the Dietrich College alumni newsletter.