Introduction: The 2020 Workplace
Who could have guessed that one of the big differences between life now and ten years ago would be our growing dependence on a mathematician who died nearly 250 years ago? If you’ve ever used Google, then you have relied on the work of Thomas Bayes, whose theorem is the basis of everything from running Google’s search engine to predicting which door to choose on Let’s Make a Deal. Although the complex theorem largely belongs in the provenance of mathematicians, engineers, and scientists, for the rest of us, it can be simply stated: the likelihood that something will happen can be plausibly estimated by how often it occurred in the past.1 From this simple premise comes the revolution we have all experienced ...
