Abraham de Moivre
Abraham de Moivre FRS (French pronunciation: [abʁaam də mwavʁ]; 26 May 1667 – 27 November 1754) was a French mathematician known for de Moivre's formula, a formula that links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory.
Abraham de Moivre
He moved to England at a young age due to the religious persecution of Huguenots in France which reached a climax in 1685 with the Edict of Fontainebleau.[1]
He was a friend of Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, and James Stirling. Among his fellow Huguenot exiles in England, he was a colleague of the editor and translator Pierre des Maizeaux.
De Moivre wrote a book on probability theory, The Doctrine of Chances, said to have been prized by gamblers. De Moivre first discovered Binet's formula, the closed-form expression for Fibonacci numbers linking the nth power of the golden ratio φ to the nth Fibonacci number. He also was the first to postulate the central limit theorem, a cornerstone of probability theory.
Celebrations[edit]
On 25 November 2017, a colloquium was organised in Saumur by Dr Conor Maguire, with the patronage of the French National Commission of UNESCO, to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the birth of de Moivre and the fact that he studied for two years at the Academy of Saumur. The colloquium was titled Abraham de Moivre : le Mathématicien, sa vie et son œuvre and covered De Moivre's important contributions to the development of complex numbers, see De Moivre's formula, and to probability theory, see De Moivre–Laplace theorem. The colloquium traced De Moivre's life and his exile in London where he became a highly respected friend of Isaac Newton. Nonetheless, he lived on modest means which he generated partly by his sessions advising gamblers in the Old Slaughter's Coffee House on the probabilities associated with their endeavours! On 27 November 2016, Professor Christian Genest of the McGill University (Montreal) marked the 262nd anniversary of the death of de Moivre with a colloquium in Limoges titled Abraham de Moivre : Génie en exil which discussed De Moivre's famous approximation of the binomial law which inspired the central limit theorem.