 A significant indirect influence was Thomas Simpson, who achieved a result that closely resembled de Moivre's. According to Simpsons' work's preface, his own work depended greatly on de Moivre's; the latter in fact described Simpson's work as an abridged version of his own. Finally, Thomas Bayes wrote an essay discussing theological implications of de Moivre's results: his solution to a problem, namely that of determining the probability of an event by its relative frequency, was taken as a proof for the existence of God by Bayes. Finally in 1812, Pierre-Simon Laplace published his Théorie analytique des probabilités in which he consolidated and laid down many fundamental results in probability and statistics such as the moment generating function, method of least squares, inductive probability, and hypothesis testing, thus completing the final phase in the development of classical probability. Indeed, in light of all this, there is good reason Bernoulli's work is hailed as such a seminal event; not only did his various influences, direct and indirect, set the mathematical study of combinatorics spinning, but even theology was impacted.
