Howard Borden Newcombe then laid the probabilistic foundations of modern record linkage theory in a 1959 article in Science.[5] These were formalized in 1969 by Ivan Fellegi and Alan Sunter, in their pioneering work "A Theory For Record Linkage", where they proved that the probabilistic decision rule they described was optimal when the comparison attributes were conditionally independent.[6] In their work they recognized the growing interest in applying advances in computing and automation to large collections of administrative data, and the Fellegi-Sunter theory remains the mathematical foundation for many record linkage applications.