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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 [Paperback]
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne (Author)
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Book Description
Publication Date: September 25, 2012

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 scientific controversies of all time. 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, even 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 decoding to Homeland Security. "The Theory That Would Not Die" is a vivid account of the generations-long dispute over one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of applied mathematics and statistics.

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Editorial Reviews Review

"If you're not thinking like a Bayesian, perhaps you should be."John Allen Paulos, New York Times Book Review (John Allen Paulos New York Times Book Review ) "A masterfully researched tale of human struggle and accomplishment . . . . Renders perplexing mathematical debates digestible and vivid for even the most lay of audiences."Michael Washburn, Boston Globe (Michael Washburn Boston Globe ) [An] engrossing study.Her book is a compelling and entertaining fusion of history, theory and biography.Ian Critchley, Sunday Times (Ian Critchley Sunday Times 20110619) The Theory That Would Not Die is a rollicking tale of the triumph of a powerful mathematical tool.Andrew Robinson, Nature (Andrew Robinson Nature 20110728) The Theory That Would Not Die is the first popular science book to document the rocky story of Bayess rule. At times, her tale has everything you would expect of a modern-day thriller. . . . To have crafted a page-turner out of the history of statistics is an impressive feat. If only lectures at university had been this racy.David Robson, New Scientist (David Robson New Scientist 20110702) We now know how to think rationally about our uncertain world. This book describes in vivid prose, accessible to the lay person, the development of Bayes' rule over more than two hundred years from an idea to its widespread acceptance in practice. Dennis Lindley, University College London (Dennis Lindley 20100809) "A book simply highlighting the astonishing 200 year controversy over Bayesian analysis would have been highly welcome. This book does so much more, however, uncovering the almost secret role of Bayesian analysis in a stunning series of the most important developments of the twentieth century. What a revelation and what a delightful read!"James Berger, Arts & Sciences Professor of Statistics, Duke University, and member, National Academy of Sciences (James Berger 20100816) Well known in statistical circles, Bayess Theorem was first given in a posthumous paper by the English clergyman Thomas Bayes in the mideighteenth century. McGrayne provides a fascinating account of the modern use of this result in matters as diverse as cryptography, assurance, the investigation of the connection between smoking and cancer, RAND, the identification of the author of certain papers in The Federalist, election forecasting and the search for a missing H-bomb. The general reader will enjoy her easy style and the way in which she has successfully illustrated the use of a result of prime importance in scientific work. Andrew I. Dale, author of A History of Inverse Probability From Thomas Bayes to Karl Pearson and Most Honorable Remembrance: The Life and Work of Thomas Bayes (Andrew I. Dale 20100819) Compelling, fast-paced reading full of lively characters and anecdotes. . . .A great story. Robert E. Kass, Carnegie Mellon University (Robert E. Kass ) "Makes the theory come alive. . .enjoyable. . .densely packed and engaging, . . .very accessible. . .an admirable job of giving a voice to the scores of famous and non-famous people and data who contributed, for good or for worse."Significance Magazine (Significance Magazine ) "A very compelling documented account. . .very interesting reading."Jose Bernardo, Valencia List Blog (Jose Bernardo Valencia List Blog ) "An intellectual romp touching on, among other topics, military ingenuity, the origins of modern epidemiology, and the theological foundation of modern mathematics."Michael Washburn, Boston Globe (Michael Wasburn Boston Globe ) "McGrayne's The Theory That Would Not Die is the first popular science book to document the rocky story of Bayes's rule . . . . Her tale has everything you would expect of a modern-day thriller. Espionage, nuclear warfare and cold war paranoia all feature as she tracks the theory's crucial role in Alan Turing's code-breaking during the second world war, and the US navy's later use of the technique to track Soviet submarines."New Scientist (New Scientist ) "To have crafted a page-turner out of the history of statistics is an impressive feat. If only lectures at university had been this racy."New Scientist (New Scientist )

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Amazon.com: The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Do
This account of how a once reviled theory, Bayes rule, came to underpin modern life is both approachable and engrossing.The Sunday Times (The Sunday Times 20110626) The Theory That Would Not Die is an impressively researched, rollicking tale of the triumph of a powerful mathematical tool.Andrew Robinson, Nature Vol. 475 (Andrew Robinson Nature Vol. 475 20110728) Editor's Choice, New York Times Book Review (New York Times Book Review ) "A lively, engaging historical account...McGrayne describes actuarial, business, and military uses of the Bayesian approach, including its application to settle the disputed authorship of 12 of the Federalist Papers, and its use to connect cigarette smoking and lung cancer...All of this is accomplished through compelling, fast-moving prose...The reader cannot help but enjoy learning about some of the more gossipy episodes and outsized personalities."Choice (Choice ) McGrayne is such a good writer that she makes this obscure battle gripping for the general reader.Engineering and Technology Magazine (Engineering and Technology Magazine ) ..scientists and statisticians have fought over a deep philosophical divide about probability, which Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores with great clarity and wit.Christine Evans-Pughe, Engineering and Technology Magazine (Christine Evans-Pughe Engineering and Technology Magazine 20111101) "McGrayne explains [it] beautifully...Top holiday reading."The Australian (The Australian ) "Engaging....Readers will be amazed at the impact that Bayes' rule has had in diverse fields, as well as by its rejection by too many statisticians....I was brought up, statistically speaking, as what is called a frequentist...But reading McGrayne's book has made me determined to try, once again, to master the intricacies of Bayesian statisics. I am confident that other readers will feel the same."The Lancet (The Lancet ) "Thorough research of the subject matter coupled with flowing prose, an impressive set of interviews with Bayesian statisticians, and an extremely engaging style in telling the personal stories of the few nonconformist heroes of the Bayesian school."Sam Behseta, Chance (Sam Behseta Chance ) "A fascinating and engaging tale."Mathematical Association of America Reviews (Mathematical Association of America Reviews ) "For the student who is being exposed to Bayesian statistics for the first time, McGrayne's book provides a wealth of illustrations to whet his or her appetite for more. It will broaden and deepen the field of reference of the more expert statistician, and the general reader will find an understandable, well-written, and fascinating account of a scientific field of great importance today."Andrew I. Dale, Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Andrew I. Dale Notices of the American Mathematical Society ) "A very engaging book that statisticians, probabilists, and history buffs in the mathematical sciences should enjoy."David Agard, CryptologIA (David Agard CryptologIA ) Fascinating.I truly admire [McGraynes] style of writing, and ability to turn complex mathematical ideas into intriguing stories, centered around real people.Judea Pearl, winner of the 2012 Turing Award (Judea Pearl ) "Delightful ... [and] McGrayne gives a superb synopsis of the fundamental development of probability and statistics by Laplace."Scott L. Zeger of Johns Hopkins, Physics Today (Physics Today Scott L. Zeger ) "McGrayne holds the hand of the general reader as she lays out the history of the theorem and how it is now used in just about every walk of life Science writing at its absolute peak."The Bookseller (The Bookseller 20120713)

About the Author

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne is the author of numerous books, including Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries and Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World. She lives in Seattle.

Product Details
Paperback: 360 pages Publisher: Yale University Press; Reprint edition (September 25, 2012) Language: English ISBN-10: 0300188226 ISBN-13: 978-0300188226 Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.1 x 9.1 inches Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies) Average Customer Review: (54 customer reviews) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #24,156 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) Did we miss any relevant features for this product? Tell us what we missed. Would you like to update product info, give feedback on images, or tell us about a lower price?

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Customer Reviews
(54) 3.5 out of 5 stars 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 18 11 10 12 3

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the history of science, statistics and mathematics, but be prepared for a "patchy" read.
Denys Yeo | 7 reviewers made a similar statement

The book is well written but I was disappointed by the lack of any detail on the underlying statistics.
mbwelsh | 4 reviewers made a similar statement

See all 54 customer reviews

Every chapter was a quickly paced story of some very important but never discussed aspect of history or modern life.
Davis | 2 reviewers made a similar statement

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

162 of 168 people found the following review helpful

An enjoyable popular science book that needs more depth May 29, 2011
By Sitting in Seattle Format: Kindle Edition | Amazon Verified Purchase

"The Theory That Would Not Die" is an enjoyable account of the history of Bayesian statistics from Thomas Bayes's first idea to the ultimate (near-)triumph of Bayesian methods in modern statistics. As a statistically-oriented researcher and avowed Bayesian myself, I found that the book fills in details about the personalities, battles, and tempestuous history of the concepts. If you are generally familiar with the concept of Bayes' rule and the fundamental technical debate with frequentist theory, then I can wholeheartedly recommend the book because it will deepen your understanding of the history. The main limitation occurs if you are *not* familiar with the statistical side of the debate but are a general popular science reader: the book refers obliquely to the fundamental problems but does not delve into enough technical depth to communicate the central elements of the debate. I think McGrayne should have used a chapter very early in the book to illustrate the technical difference between the two theories -- not in terms of mathematics or detailed equations, but in terms of a practical question that would show how the Bayesian approach can answer questions that traditional statistics cannot. In many cases in McGrayne's book, we find assertions that the Bayesian methods yielded better answers in one situation or another, but the underlying intuition about *why* or *how* is missing. The Bayesian literature is full of such examples that could be easily explained. A good example occurs on p. 1 of ET Jaynes's Probability Theory: I observe someone climbing out a window in the middle of the night carrying a bag over the shoulder and running away. Question: is it likely that this person is a burgler? A traditional statistical analysis can give no answer, because no hypothesis can be rejected with observation of only one case. A Bayesian analysis, however, can use prior information (e.g., the prior knowledge that people rarely climb out wndows in the middle of the night) to yield both a technically correct answer and one that obviously is in better, common-sense alignment with the kinds of judgments we all make. If the present book included a bit more detail to show exactly how this occurs and why the difference arises, I think it would be substantially more powerful for a general audience. In conclusion: a good and entertaining book, although if you know nothing about the underlying debate, it may leave you wishing for more detail and concrete examples. If you already understand the technical side in some depth and can fill in the missing detail, then it will be purely enjoyable and you will learn much about the back history of the competing approaches to statistics.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

Meh. Wish I got more out of it. I am of two minds on this book. On the one hand, it's really well written. At the end of every chapter I find myself charged up and excited about all the cool things... Read more
Published 14 days ago by Eric Osborne

Surprising and compelling history of the controversy The five stars are for excellence in research and storytelling. When I attended two statistics courses in the 1970s, each dedicated about a week to Bayes' rule. Read more
Published 19 days ago by John Schuyler

Fun history of an idea, without explaining it I found this a very enjoyable yarn about the history of an idea with fascinating practical uses that has had to overcome fiercely-held biases of establishment scientists,... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Christopher H. Wilbur

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful

Much fluff, little crunch A colleague recommended this book to me as an interesting historical account of the rise of Bayesian statistics. Read more
Published 1 month ago by mbwelsh

Bayes' rule is alive and well! June 5, 2011

By Denys Yeo Format: Hardcover | Amazon Verified Purchase

This book moves through the history (so far) of the development and application of Bayes rule. It is a good story, and the book is well written. Unfortunately, it is somewhat mixed in the manner

www.amazon.com/Theory-That-Would-Not-Die/dp/0300188226/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1

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Amazon.com: The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Do material is presented. For example, the author provides significant detail on the application of the rule to activities such as code cracking and finding submarines but she then goes on to list a large number of more recent applications with very little historical background. Maintaining consistency of depth for each application discussed would have significantly improved the "story". I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the history of science, statistics and mathematics, but be prepared for a "patchy" read.
Comment | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Makes you want to read more. As the second world war started the German military used a hugely sophisticated encryption machine - Enigma- which allowed their military units to co-operate intensely with each... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Hugh Claffey

234 of 283 people found the following review helpful

A Complete Muddle June 17, 2011

By Herbert Gintis Format: Hardcover | Amazon Verified Purchase

Biography of a phenomenon If you're looking for a mathematical explanation of Bayesian inference, you want a book that this never meant to be. Read more
Published 2 months ago by wiredweird

Sharon Bertsch Mcgrayne is a talented science writer whose portraits of great scientists of the past are incisive and entertaining. However, she evidently believes that one must studiously avoid dealing with any serious scientific issues in entertaining a popular audience. For this reason, this book is a total failure. Why should a reader care about the history of an idea of which he or she has zero understanding? Mcgrayne turns the history of Bayes rule into a pitched battle between intransigent opponents, but we never find out what the real issue are. In fact, Bayes rule is a mathematical tautology, being the definition of conditional probability. Suppose A is an event with probability P(A) and B is an event with probability P(B). Let C be the event "both A and B occur." Then the conditional probability P(A|B) of event A, given that we know that B has occurred, just P(C)/P(B). Moreover, if a decision-maker knows P(A), P(B), and P(C), and discovers that B occurred, then he should revise the probability that A occurred to P(A|B) = P(C)/P(B). Why? Well, suppose we have a population of 1000 individuals, where the probability that an event E is true of an individual is P(E), where E is any one of A, B, and C. Then the expected number of individuals for which B is true is 1000*P(B). Of these, the number for which A is also true is 1000*P(A). Therefore, the probability that an individual satisfies A, given that he satisfies B, is 1000*P(A)/1000*P(B) = P(A|B). For instance, suppose 5% of the population uses drugs, and there is a drug test that is correct 95% of the time: it tests positive on a drug user 95% of the time, and it tests negative on a drug nonuser 95% of the time. If an individual tests positive, we can show using Bayes rule that the probability of his being a drug user is 50%. To see this, let A be the event "subject uses drugs," and let B be the event "subject test positive for using drugs." First, what is the probability P(B) of event B? Well, take a random subject. With probability 1/20 he is a drug user, so with probability (19/20)(1/20)=19/400 he is a drug user testing positive. With probability 19/20 he not a drug user, so he is a non-user testing positive with probability (1/20)(19/20)=19/400. Thus P(B) = 19/400+19/400=38/400. Let event C be "subject uses drugs and tests positive for using drugs." This probability is (1/20) times (19/20) = 19/400. Thus P(A|B) = P(C)/P(B) = 1/2. If this seems mystifying, consider the following interpretation. Suppose we test 10000 people. The expected number of drug users will be 500, and 95% of them, or 475, will test positive for drug use. But 9500 people will be non-drug users, and 5% of them will erroneously test positive for drug use, which is 475 people. Thus, 50% of those who test positive for drugs are actually drug users. The real brilliance of Bayes Rule lies in the fact that sometimes we want to find P(A|B) when we don't know either P(C) or P(B), but we do know P(B|A) and P(A). For instance, want to know P(A|B), meaning the probability that an individual who test positive is actually a drug user, but we only know the frequency P(A) of drug use in the population (5%) and the accuracy of the test, which is P(B|A) = 95% (a drug user tests positive with probability 0.95). Then we can write P(A|B)P(B) = P(C)=P(B|A)P(A). From the first and third terms we get P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B). In our case, this gives P(A|B) = 0.95(0.05)/P(B)=0.0475/P(B). But we can also calculate P(B) as follows. Let N mean "A is false for the subject." Thus P(N) = 1-P(A) = 0.95. Then we have P(B) = P(B|A)P(A) + P(B|N)P(N), as can be verified by simply multiplying out the right hand side of the equation. Thus in our case we have, given that we know that P(B|N) = 0.95 (the test accurately predicts that a non-user is a non-user with probability 0.95), so we have P(B) = 0.95(0.05) + 0.05(0.95) = 0.95. Thus P(A|B) = 0.0475/0.95 = 1/2. Isn't this a simple and beautiful result? Only arithmetic and grade school algebra are used to arrive at this stunning result. By the way, for more on Bayes Rule, see my textbook Game Theory Evolving (Princeton 2009). www.amazon.com/Theory-That-Would-Not-Die/dp/0300188226/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1

Entertaining stories, but I still don't understand Bayes' Rule I've taken two statistics classes in my life, and I remember being confused by Bayes' Theorem in both classes. So I was hoping that this book would clarify matters for me. Read more
Published 2 months ago by J. Doe

This is a fun read! This book is an entertaining account of how we got the technology for such things as online searches and smart-phone voice recognition. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Jim Link

Not sure what the purpose is I am, or was before I retired, a Bayesian doing risk analysis in an business setting. I knew something of the history of the conflict between frequentists and Bayesians--and had... Read more
Published 3 months ago by A. Woronow

Read Up on Baye's Before Reading Sharon McGrayne tackles Baye's Rule in her volume The Theory that Would Not Die. Along the way she shows how the `rule' has gone under only to reappear in different times, be used... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Lynn

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Amazon.com: The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Do

Now, who could dispute this analysis? It is clearly correct. So where does all of the vehement opposition to Bayes rule come from? The answer is that when a group of individuals (e.g., professional scientists) do not agree on P(A) then you cannot apply Bayes rule. You can however show that under many conditions, repeated observations of events A can lead to mutually acceptable values for P(A). For instance, suppose you know that the weight of a substance per ounce is variable and unknown, and each scientist i has his personal prior probability Pi that the weight is less than one gram per ounce. Suppose we take unbiased samples that are each about one ounce, and we take unbiased measurements of the weight. Then the long-run average of the sample weights will be accepted by all scientists as the updated probability. This is Bayesian updating. However, it is not true that Bayesian updating always lead to convergence to a common probability distribution. See, for instance, papers by Mordecai Kurz, of Stanford University. Moreover, when observations are limited, the range of assessments of probabilities can be quite wide. This is why Bayes rule is considered "subjective." However, when we really know the probabilities, as in the case of the drug testing example, there is no controversy about the value of Bayes rule. It is extremely valuable, indeed indispensable, in such cases. This book manages to obfuscate a very simple issue, turning sciences into a vast morality play. Now of course there are deep issues in the philosophy of probability that implicate Bayes rule, but one does not learn what they are from this book.
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