Mike Lynch referred to as the British Bill Gates… but his genius is on a far superior mathematical scale, says MAGGIE PAGANO

It is tragic to learn that Mike Lynch, one of Britain’s most brilliant tech entrepreneurs, and his 18-year-old daughter are still missing after his luxury super yacht was hit by a freak storm off the coast of Sicily yesterday morning.

So far one person has been confirmed dead, and four others are still missing after the Bayesian capsized having being struck by a tornado not far from Palermo. His wife has been rescued.

Although Lynch has often been referred to as the UK’s answer to West Coast brains such as Bill Gates, his genius was actually quite different, and on a superior mathematical scale. 

And the name of his 184ft £30m super yacht is a giveaway to his great skills.

At the heart of the many highly successful and pioneering companies that Lynch has either founded or invested in – from Autonomy to cyber-security company Darktrace and software group Featurespace – lies Bayesian statistics.

This is the field of statistics based on the work of the 18th century mathematician, Thomas Bayes, where probability expresses a degree of belief in an event. 

This could, for example, be based on earlier knowledge of an event – such as results of previous experiments or indeed personal beliefs.

That may sound complex but it’s the genesis of how banks use machine learning algorithms to track down fraud on your bank account or, indeed, how the security services hunt down terrorists.

It was at Cambridge while studying for his PhD in neural networks – machine learning to us – that the Essex scholarship boy became transfixed by probability and adaptive behaviour patterns.

It is also when he started mixing his maths skills with business, creating audio products for music synthesisers and computer-based fingerprint recognition.

Then came Autonomy, one of the pioneers in analysing business data using machine learning, which made him billions when he sold it for $11bn to Silicon Valley computing giant, Hewlett Packard, some 13 years ago.

The fabulous riches bestowed on Lynch momentarily sealed his reputation as the UK’s most successful tech tycoons, putting him on a global stage with peers like Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs.

It was also a crowning moment for the Cambridge tech scene, cementing its reputation as one of the world’s most innovative scientific clusters. 

Yet it was to prove Lynch’s nemesis, leading to one of the bloodiest cross-Atlantic legal contests.

HP sued Lynch for alleged fraud, claiming Autonomy had overstated its revenue by over $5bn and demanded billions in damages.

Lynch professed his innocence throughout, claiming that HP had ‘buyer’s remorse’ and hadn’t done enough due diligence.

After a ten-year legal ding-dong, the US authorities extradited him from his East Anglia home at dawn one morning, putting him in handcuffs and chains on a flight back to San Francisco where he was kept under house arrest for 13 months during the trial. 

But less than three months ago, the entrepreneur was cleared of 15 counts of fraud. 

In a recent BBC Radio 4 interview, Lynch, 59, described his elation from being released. 

‘Until you hear the words, you can’t call it and at that point it is indescribable the way in which you jump between two universes.

‘If this had gone the wrong way, it would have been the end of life as I have known it in any sense.’

Asked in another interview whether the experience had been like a near-death one, Lynch said: ‘That is very much how I handled it. It’s bizarre, but now you have a second life. The question is, what do you want to do with it?’

Lynch’s horrendous experience also reveals the huge costs of the US judicial system, and how almost impossible it is to fight court cases without a small fortune.

As Lynch himself admitted, if he had not had the money to spend on his defence -upwards of £30m – he would not have stood a chance against US judicial might.

His case showed once again how relentless the US authorities are about extraditing UK nationals.

But it seems impossible for our authorities to extradite US citizens, as the death of Harry Dunn, killed by a car driven by a former US spy in 2019, demonstrated.

A fitting honour for Lynch would be if the UK toughened up those treaties.

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