Abraham de Moivre
An exiled mathematician who laid the hidden foundations of modern statistics and probability while living on the fringes of London society.
1667–1754 (age 87)·French mathematician·Birthday: May 26
Biography
Born into a Protestant family in France, Abraham de Moivre fled to England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, trading a life of religious persecution for one of intellectual obscurity. In London, he scraped a living as a private tutor, his brilliant mind applied to the nascent fields of probability and actuarial science. His most enduring legacy, de Moivre's formula, elegantly wove together complex numbers and trigonometry, a cornerstone for future mathematical exploration. Perhaps more consequentially, his work on the normal distribution, presented in his 1738 work 'The Doctrine of Chances,' became a critical precursor to the work of Gauss and Laplace, forming the bedrock of statistical analysis. He famously predicted the day of his own death through mathematical calculation, finding he was sleeping 15 minutes longer each night and extrapolating to the day the sleep time would reach 24 hours.
#1 When Abraham Was Born
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Abraham's Life & Times
The world at every milestone
1667Born
1672Started school
1680Became a teenager
1683Could drive
1685Could vote
1688Turned 21
1697Turned 30
1707Turned 40
1717Turned 50
1727Turned 60
1737Turned 70
1747Turned 80
1754Died at 87
Key Achievements
- Formulated de Moivre's theorem, a fundamental link between complex numbers and trigonometry.
- Pioneered early work on the normal distribution, a cornerstone of probability and statistics.
- Authored 'The Doctrine of Chances,' a foundational text in probability theory.
- Made significant contributions to actuarial science and mortality statistics.
Did You Know?
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1697.
He supported himself largely by solving probability problems for wealthy gamblers.
A story, possibly apocryphal, claims he correctly predicted the date of his own death.
He was a close friend and correspondent of Sir Isaac Newton.
“The doctrine of chances consists in reducing all events of the same kind to a certain number of cases equally possible.”
