Everything about Abraham De Moivre totally explained
» "Moivre" redirects here; for the French commune see Moivre, Marne.
Abraham de Moivre (
May 26,
1667 in
Vitry-le-François,
Champagne,
France –
November 27,
1754 in
London,
England; ) was a
French mathematician famous for
de Moivre's formula, which links
complex numbers and
trigonometry, and for his work on the
normal distribution and
probability theory. He was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society in 1697, and was a friend of
Isaac Newton,
Edmund Halley, and
James Stirling. Among his fellow
Huguenot exiles in
England, he was a colleague of the editor and translator
Pierre des Maizeaux.
The social status of his family is unclear, but de Moivre's father, a surgeon, was able to send him to the Protestant academy at
Sedan (1678-82). De Moivre studied logic at
Saumur (1682-84), attended the
Collège de Harcourt in Paris (1684), and studied privately with
Jacques Ozanam (1684-85). It doesn't appear that de Moivre received a college degree.
De Moivre was a
Calvinist. He left France after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes (1685) and spent the remainder of his life in England.
Throughout his life he remained poor. It is reported that he was a regular customer of Slaughter's Coffee House, St. Martin's Lane at Cranbourn Street, where he earned a little money from playing
chess.
He died in
London and was buried at
St Martin-in-the-Fields, although his body was later moved.
De Moivre wrote a book on
probability theory, entitled
The Doctrine of Chances. It was said that his book was highly prized by gamblers. It is reported in all seriousness that de Moivre correctly predicted the day of his own death. Noting that he was sleeping 15 minutes longer each day, De Moivre surmised that he'd die on the day he'd sleep for 24 hours. A simple mathematical calculation quickly yielded the date, November 27, 1754. He did indeed pass away on that day.
He first discovered the "closed form" expression for
Fibonacci numbers linking the n
th power of phi to the n
th Fibonacci number.
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