Birthday: 22 January

Not to be confused with Roger Bacon (1214–1294).

1. Once upon a time, there was a man who was convinced that he possessed a Great Idea.
2. Indeed, as the man thought upon the Great Idea more and more, he realized that it was not just a great idea, but the most wonderful idea ever.
3. The Great Idea would unravel the mysteries of the universe, supersede the authority of the corrupt and error-ridden Establishment, confer nigh-magical powers upon its wielders, feed the hungry, heal the sick, make the whole world a better place, etc., etc., etc.
4. The man was Francis Bacon, his Great Idea was the scientific method, and he was the only crackpot in all history to claim that level of benefit to humanity and turn out to be completely right.

—Yudkowsky

It was actually Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham (965–1040) (known in English as Alhazen), who invented and demonstrated the scientific method while working with optics. He was likewise aware of its importance, but was unknown in the West, so Francis Bacon gets credit for reading about him and popularizing the idea. It's worth noting thta Bacon was quite open about where he got the idea, but the English were not so interested in paying attention to some Arab.

I infer that when it was Bacon's turn to talk about the scientific method, it took root in the West because there was a fertile cultural environment for it, as Yuval Noah Harari describes in Sapiens: A History of Humankind.

Some quotes

“Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.”

“The general root of superstition : namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.”

“If we are to achieve things never before accomplished we must employ methods never before attempted”

“Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.”

What links here

• Speech about Humankind – devel
• Meta-science
• Timeline of people born

Predicted a catastrophic mass starvation if mankind continues to increase its numbers. The Malthusian catastrophe has been delayed due to advances in agriculture.

What links here

• Timeline of people born
• Charles Darwin (1809–1882)

Known for

• FFT (Fast Fourier Transform)
• the now ubiquitous box plot
• etc.

After WW2, worked at AT&T Bell Labs. Invented the term "bit" in 1947, a term first used in Claude Shannon's 1948 paper. May also have coined the word "software".

In analysis of variance, we use Tukey's HSD.

Physicists are among the smartest high IQ people, there is no doubt. If you want a single case example take Richard Feynman. If we could have lured him to psychology an important concept probably would have been published 35 years earlier.

In 1939 Feynman as a graduate student at Princeton experimented just for fun together with his friend John Tukey (who later became the famous statistician) to assess the ability of measuring time by counting.(Gleick,1992) They run stairs up and down to accelerate their heartbeats and trained themselves at the same time to count seconds and steps. Feynman’s performance deteriorated when he talked but not when he read. Tukey instead performed well when he recited poems aloud and worse when he read. So both have detected what is now known as the two slave systems of working memory, namely the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad. Now you get a feeling how much more psychology would have been advanced if brains like theirs had been invested in my discipline at that time.

Tukey handled predicting the 1962 US elections, and didn't tell anyone he used approximate Bayesian methods. This was one of the earliest practical uses of Bayes, otherwise too calculation-heavy.

What links here

• History of statistics
• Timeline of people born

A prolific mathematician, who developed much of the notation we use, particularly in analysis (calculus). For example, naming the number pi, well, pi, was his idea. Introduced the concept of a mathematical function. Pierre-Simon Laplace said "Read Euler, Read Euler, he is the master of us all".

His eyesight worsened over time. In 1738, he got blind in his right eye, so that King Frederick called him "Cyclops". In 1766, he got blind in his left eye. He said, "Now I will have fewer distractions". He had a freak memory and ability for mental calculation, and with the aid of his scribes, Euler's productivity actually increased, producing one paper every week in the year 1775.

What links here

• Timeline of people born
• Math