Going to the Supermarket Past One of Your Heros’ Grave
I said in an earlier post that I preferred to use the Waitrose in the Barbican, as it is less-crowded and an easy bus ride home.
Today I took the bus to the supermarket and found that I could walk through Bunhill Fields to cut the corner off from Old Street. It is an old and famous cemetery, where such as Isaac Watts, John Bunyan, Eleanor Coade, Thomas Newcomen, Daniel Defoe and William Blake were laid to rest.
Bunhill Fields
It also contains the grave of a man, whose legacy touches us thousands of times every year, the Reverend Thomas Bayes. His grave is in this picture somewhere.
The Grave of Thomas Bayes
So why does Bayes touch us every day? His legacy is also totally positive as it is his thinking that is behind Bayesian spam filtering, used in all those programs that attempt to stop all of those rediculous e-mails we don’t want, getting to our computer.
But this is only one of a myriad set of applications of the work of Thomas Bayes. There aren’t many people, who’ve had such a beneficial effect on such a broad front, centuries after their death.
So when it comes to Great Britons, Bayes is in the first rank.
never has going to the supermarket for basic daily needs, been so interesting.
The Anonymous Widower 
I’d never heard of Rev Thomas Bayes. Just wilki’d him and not sure I understand still!
Comment by Karrie | December 24, 2010 |
There’d be much more spam in your InBox if he hadn’t worked out his theories of inverse probabilities.
Comment by AnonW | December 24, 2010 |