Thomas Bayes
A Nonconformist minister who published almost nothing in his lifetime, then left behind an essay that would eventually give an entire school of statistics its name
Thomas Bayes published nothing on probability during his lifetime. The essay that made him famous -- An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances -- was found among his papers after his death and submitted to the Royal Society by his friend Richard Price in 1763. This bio covers what little is known of his life as a Tunbridge Wells minister, his anonymous defense of Newton's calculus, and how Laplace and later Poincaré turned his single posthumous essay into the foundation of Bayesian inference -- plus the widely reproduced portrait of him that almost certainly isn't him at all.