ksvanhorn comments on A History of Bayes’ Theorem

[ksvanhorn]

Thanks for the interesting review. Sounds like a book I’ll want to read.

Still… no mention of Jaynes and the method of maximum entropy? No mention of Cox’s Theorem?

[gwern]

Cox is not mentioned. Jaynes is mentioned twice:

A loss of leadership, a series of career changes, and geographical moves contributed to the gloom. Jimmie Savage, chief U.S. spokesman for Bayes as a logical and comprehensive system, died of a heart attack in 1971. After Fermi’s death, Harold Jeffreys and American physicist Edwin T. Jaynes campaigned in vain for Bayes in the physical sciences; Jaynes, who said he always checked to see what Laplace had done before tackling an applied problem, turned off many colleagues with his Bayesian fervor.

and later:

Medical testing, in particular, benefited from Bayesian analysis. Many medical tests involve imaging, and Larry Bretthorst, a student of the Bayes- ian physicist Ed Jaynes, improved nuclear magnetic resonancing, or NMR, signal detection by several orders of magnitude in 1990. Bretthorst had studied imaging problems to improve the detection of radar signals for the Army Missile Command.