Mike Lynch was Britain’s first software billionaire

Bayes’s theorem, an 18th-century formula, holds that with the right understanding of probabilities, most outcomes are predictable. But sometimes freak events occur. In the early hours of August 19th, a superyacht owned by the wife of Mike Lynch, a British tech entrepreneur who only months ago was cleared in a vast American fraud case, was struck by a waterspout, a form of tornado, off the north coast of Sicily, and capsized. On August 22nd it was confirmed that Mr Lynch was among five bodies recovered from the sunken yacht; rescue teams continued to search for a missing woman. It was a tragic end to an extraordinary story.