Famous Like Me > Actor > C > John Craig
Profile of John Craig
on Famous Like Me |
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| Name: |
John Craig |
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| Date of Birth: |
5th March 1928 |
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| Place of Birth: |
Indianapolis, Indiana, USA |
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| Profession: |
Actor |
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From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia
- This article is about John Craig the Scottish mathematician. For the Canadian children's author, see John Craig (author). For the secret agent of James Munro's books, see John Craig (fictional agent).
John Craig (1663–1731) was a Scottish mathematician. A friend of Newton, he wrote several minor works about the new calculus. He is mainly known for his book Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Christian Theology), published in 1699.
In the aforementioned book, Craig presents a formula that describes how the probability of a historical event depends on the number of primary witnesses, on the chain of transmission through secondary witnesses, on the elapsed time and on the spatial distance. Using this formula, Craig derived that the probability of the story of Jesus would reach 0 in the year 3150. This year he interpreted as the Second Coming of Christ because of verse 18:8 in the Gospel of Luke.
His work was poorly received. Several later mathematicians complained about his imprecise use of probability and the unsupported derivation of his formula. Stephen Stigler, in his 1999 book (see references, below) gave a more favorable interpretation, pointing out that some of Craig's reasoning can be justified if his "probability" is interpreted as the log-likelihood ratio.
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