Inside the life of brilliant and eccentric Mike Lynch – The James Bond obsessive who became Britain’s Bill Gates and took on the US legal system [Video]

As a mathematician whose particular expertise was probability, Mike Lynch prided himself on defying the odds.

The nerdy multi-millionaire entrepreneur – dubbed ‘Britain’s Bill Gates‘ – even named his superyacht after the ‘Bayesian’ statistical theory on which he built his software fame and fortune.

He boasted that he created a software empire by ignoring conventional business wisdom – and in June he defied conventional legal wisdom that says you can’t beat US federal prosecutors when he was acquitted on all counts in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest-ever fraud trials.

Yet surely even Lynch might have discounted the odds, just two months after being spared spending the rest of his life in a US prison, of dying when a freak Mediterranean ‘tornado’ sank his yacht.

The 184ft Bayesian, named after the 18th century English clergyman and statistician Thomas Bayes, sank off the Sicily coast.