"At least two terrible ironies surround the death of Mike Lynch. One lies in the name of his superyacht, which sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of 19 August 2024. He had named the boat Bayesian to honour Bayes's theorem, a mathematical rule that helps you weigh up the probability of something given the available evidence, which served as Lynch's guiding light over the course of a tempestuous career."
"The theorem was a beautiful key to our minds, Lynch believed. But it was entirely incapable of predicting the outcome that morning, when the yacht capsized during a storm, killing seven people, including Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah and his US lawyer, Chris Morvillo. A second irony lies in the fact that Lynch had just come through the trial of his life, one he felt was bound to end in jail, where he thought he could die."
"Born in 1965 to a firefighter father and a nurse mother, he spent the first eight years of his life in Ilford, east London, a rough suburb in those days, where the family felt like outsiders because of their Irish background. He'd been born with an unusual physical trait, having no fingerprints. It was an obvious metaphor for his future acquittal. As he himself would joke: I would make an excellent criminal!"
Mike Lynch named his superyacht Bayesian after Bayes's theorem and died when it capsized off Sicily on 19 August 2024, killing seven people including his daughter and lawyer. The theorem guided his decisions but could not predict the storm that capsized the yacht. An American jury had acquitted him and his co-defendant on all 15 fraud counts shortly before the sinking. Born in 1965 to working-class parents, he grew up in Ilford and won a scholarship to Bancroft's. He had no fingerprints, taught himself programming on a BBC Micro, showed musical talent, and combined brilliance with an often unscrupulous business side.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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