Abraham de Moivre
French mathematician
Died when: 87 years 185 days (1050 months)Star Sign: Gemini
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.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.
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