Abraham de Moivre

Abraham de Moivre FRS
Born	(1667-05-26)26 May 1667 Vitry-le-François, Kingdom of France
Died	27 November 1754(1754-11-27) (aged 87) London, England
Alma mater	Academy of Saumur Collège d'Harcourt [fr]
Known for	De Moivre's formula De Moivre's law De Moivre's martingale De Moivre–Laplace theorem Inclusion–exclusion principle Generating function
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics

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.

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.