Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, we're the show that tries

to equip you with the tools to understand numbers all around you in the news and in life,

and I'm Tim Halford.

The business school at the University of London is noted as a place to get training in business

and management, until recently it was named the Cass Business School, after an 18th century

English businessman called Sir John Cass.

Last year the school decided to change its name because of Cass's links to the slave trade

and links is putting it mildly.

He was effectively one of the directors of the Royal Africa Company, a company that

the historian William Pettigrew said had shipped more enslaved African women, men and children

to the Americas than any other single institution during the entire period of the transatlantic

slave trade.

It was a new name was announced.

Ladies and gentlemen, please be upstanding for the Bayes Business School.

Thomas Bayes was an 18th century English statistician and clergyman, but he's not that famous

even in England.

Indeed, you might call him an obscure figure if you didn't mind unleashing the wrath of

math Twitter.

So today we'll be finding out about the Reverend Bayes and one of the great statistical ideas

of all time Bayes rule, and to help us on this journey were joined by Sharon Birch

McGrain who wrote a book with the snappy title, The Theory That Would Not Die, How Bayes

Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines and Emerged Triumphant

...