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 the1740s 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 de-coding to Homeland Security. 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 controversies of all time--
