The Records Of The Burgery Of Sheffield Commonly Called The Town Trust With Introduction And Notes By J D Leader

The records of the burgery of Sheffield, with intr. and notes by J.D. Leader

Most Honourable Remembrance

I ?nd it impossible to write a preface to this work, without discovering a little of the enthusiasm which I have contracted from an attention to it. Joseph Priestley. The History and Present State of Electricity. It is generally considered bad form in writing, unless on matters autob- graphic,tomakeunbridleduseoftheperpendicularpronoun. Thereaderof the present book, however, may well wonder why one would want to study 1 the life and works of Thomas Bayes, ‘this strangely neglected topic’ , and it is only by a reluctant use of the ?rst person singular on the part of the author that this legitimate question can be answered. It was in the late 1960s that my interest in various aspects of subjective probability was awakened by some of the papers of I. J. (‘Jack’) Good, and this was followed by the reading of works such as Harold Je?reys’s Theory of Probability. In many of these the (apparently simple) result known as Bayes’s Theorem played a pivotal rˆ ole, and it struck me that it might be interesting to ?nd out a bit more about Thomas Bayes himself. In trying to satisfy this curiosity in spasmodic periods over many years I discovered that little information seemed to be available. Writings by John D.

A History of Inverse Probability

It is thought as necessary to write a Preface before a Book, as it is judged civil, when you invite a Friend to Dinner, to proffer him a Glass of Hock beforehand for a Whet. John Arbuthnot, from the preface to his translation of Huygens's "De Ratiociniis in Ludo Alooe". Prompted by an awareness of the importance of Bayesian ideas in modern statistical theory and practice, I decided some years ago to undertake a study of the development and growth of such ideas. At the time it seemed appropriate to begin such an investigation with an examination of Bayes's Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances and Laplace's Theorie analytique des probabilites, and then to pass swiftly on to a brief consideration of other nineteenth century works before turning to what would be the main topic of the treatise, videlicet the rise of Bayesian statis tics from the 1950's to the present day. It soon became apparent, however, that the amount of Bayesian work published was such that a thorough investigation of the topic up to the 1980's would require several volumes - and also run the risk of incurring the wrath of extant authors whose writings would no doubt be misrepre sented, or at least be so described. It seemed wise, therefore, to restrict the period and the subject under study in some way, and I decided to con centrate my attention on inverse probability from Thomas Bayes to Karl Pearson.