1763Mathematics
Bayes' Theorem: The Equation That Came Back from the Dead
Thomas Bayes never published his most famous result. A friend found it among his papers after he died.
Mathematics
Mathematics in AI History
The mathematical foundations of AI - probability, statistics, and optimisation results that made machine learning possible.
6 stories
1805Mathematics
Least Squares: The Statistical War That Shaped Every Regression
Gauss claimed he invented it. Legendre published it first. The dispute never fully resolved, and it's still the most widely used statistical technique in history.
1906Mathematics
Markov Chains: From a Poetry Dispute to Language Models
Markov Chains were invented to prove free will doesn't exist in Russian poetry.
1953Mathematics
SHAP: From Game Theory Tables to Model Explainability
SHAP values come from a 1953 paper on dividing poker winnings fairly.
1997Mathematics
No Free Lunch: Why There's No Best Algorithm
The No Free Lunch theorem proved that no algorithm is universally better than any other, averaged over all possible problems.
2020Mathematics
Scaling Laws: The Equation That Predicted the Future of AI
A 2020 OpenAI paper proved that AI capability scales predictably with compute, and that most teams were training their models wrong.