Pierre-Simon Laplace
French mathematician and physicist who survived the Ancien Regime, the Revolutionary Era, and the Restoration. His major contributions to science belong to two fields: the "celestial mechanics" (explanation and reconstruction of astronomical movements by means of Newtonian mechanics) and the probability theory. It seems that the combination of these two are already established at the beginning of his career (around 1774), as well as the idea of famous "Laplace's demon".
He frequently says that he was led to new results in the former by considerations of probability. Whether or not we take this remark seriously, he was certainly one of the leading figures in the formation of probabilistic method in science. However, it must pointed out that many of the extra assumptions for the applications of "inverse method of probability" (essentially the same as Bayes's theorem) were often brought in through the "principle of indifference". For instance, his "rule of succession" (for obtaining the probability of new events on the basis of past observations) clearly smuggles in principles of enumerative induction of one form or another by the application of the principle of idifference. All the same, he is one of the few giants in the history of probability and statistics.
See also a biography in MacTutor History of Mathematics
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