September 2012 book by Sharon Bertsch.

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores the controversial theorem of Bayes’ rule, 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.