The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
7 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy:
The combination of Bayes and Markov Chain Monte Carlo has been called "arguably the most powerful mechanism ever created for processing data and knowledge."Almost instantaneously MCMC and Gibbs sampling changed statisticians' entire method of attacking problems. In the words of Thomas Kuhn, it was a paradigm shift. MCMC solved real problems, used computer algorithms instead of theorems, and led statisticians and scientists into a worked where "exact" meant "simulated" and repetitive computer operations replaced mathematical equations. It was a quantum leap in statistics.
Yet Laplace had built his probability theory on intuition. As far as he was concerned, "essentially, the theory of probability is nothing but good common sense reduced to mathematics. It provides an exact appreciation of what sound minds feel with a kind of instinct, frequently without being able to account for it.
Many of Ronald A. Fisher's ideas were solutions to computational problems caused by the limitations of the era's desk calculators.
As Dennis Lindley had argued, if someone attaches a prior probability of zero the hypothesis that the moon is made of green cheese, "then the whole armies of astronauts coming back bearing green cheese cannot convince him.
At the laboratory, Turing designed the first relatively complete electronic stored-program digital computer for code breaking in 1945. Darwin deemed it too ambitious, however, and after several years Turing left in disgust. When the laboratory finally built his design in 1950, it was the fastest computer in the world and, astonishingly, had the memory capacity of an early Macintosh built three decades later.
Jack Good's contract at Virginia Tech stipulated that he would always be paid $1 more than the football coach.
knowledge is indeed highly subjective, but we can quantify it with a bet. The amount we wager shows how much we believe in something.
