On some recently discovered manuscripts of Thomas Bayes

Abstract

A set of manuscripts attributed to Thomas Bayes was recently discovered among the Stanhope of Chevening papers housed in the Centre for Kentish studies. One group of the manuscripts is directly related to Bayes's posthumous paper on infinite series. These manuscripts also show that the paper on infinite series was directly motivated by results in Maclaurin's A Treatise of Fluxions. Four other manuscripts in the collection cover a variety of mathematical topics spanning the solution to polynomial equations to infinite series expansions of powers of the arcsine function. It is conjectured that one of latter manuscripts, on the subject of trinomial divisors, predates Bayes's election to the Royal Society in 1742. From the style of writing of the manuscripts, it is also speculated that Richard Price, who presented Bayes's now famous essay on inverse probability to the Royal Society, had more of a hand in the printed version of the essay than just the transmission of its contents. © 2002 Elsevier Scienre (USA).