Irving John Good to be honored in memorial service

When he was 9 years old and recovering from diphtheria, Isidore Jacob Gudak, born to Polish-Jewish immigrants in London, independently discovered logarithms and the irrationality of the square root of two.

At 13, he rediscovered mathematical induction and, in a sense, integration. His teachers shuttled him off to the school library to pursue his own mathematical studies after he began offering solutions to problems before his teacher could finish writing them on a chalkboard.

The mathematics prodigy, who later anglicized his name to Irving John Good and became a pioneer in modern statistics, will be honored at a memorial service today, Sunday, at the Blacksburg Jewish Community Center, 201 E. Roanoke St. in Blacksburg.

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Dr. Good, a founder of modern Bayesian inference and a member of the Bletchley Park code-breaking team in England during World War II, died April 5 in Radford. He was 92.

He made fundamental contributions to the theory of Bayesian inference, a statistical method of drawing conclusions that derives from the work of the Rev. Thomas Bayes. It involves collecting evidence for a hypothesis and, at different points, as evidence mounts, calculating a numerical estimate in the degree of belief in a hypothesis. Hypotheses with a high degree of belief should be accepted, proponents say, and those with low degree rejected.

In his Bayesian work, Dr. Good drew on ideas he developed as a cryptologist working to break the German Enigma and "Fish" secret military codes during World War II at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, England.

At Bletchley's Hut 8, he was among those involved in building a very early computer, dubbed the "Heath Robinson," to break one of the German encryption systems.

After the war, Dr. Good, who had earned his doctorate at Cambridge University and advanced degrees at Oxford University, worked on statistical and mathematical computing at the University of Manchester.

He later rejoined British military intelligence, specializing in signals intelligence. Much of his work there still is considered classified. At the end of his career, he served as professor of statistics in Virginia Tech's College of Science from 1967 until 1994, when he retired as university distinguished professor. He also had held adjunct professorships in Tech's Center for the Study of Science in Society and the Department of Philosophy.

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Dr. Good particularly loved combinatorics and number theory. A fan of numerology, he liked to say that he arrived in Blacksburg on the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh month of seventh decade of the seventh year and was put in apartment seven of the seventh block of Terrace View Apartments, all by chance.

In 1967, Dr. Good went to Hollywood to advise Stanley Kubrick on scientific issues related to filming of "2001: A Space Odyssey."

"Good's work had great breath, spanning statistics, computation, number theory, and philosophy," a statement from Virginia Tech said.

Survivors include a half-sister, Yemaiel Aris of England.