Abraham de Moivre was born on May 26, 1667 in Vitry-le-François, near Paris. When he was eleven years old, his parents sent him to the French Protestant Academy at Sedan, where he spent four years studying Greek under Du Rondel. Although mathematics was not included in his studies, Abraham learned mathematics on his own, reading Huygens’ De ratiociniis in ludo aleae dealing with probabilities in games of chance. At the Collège de Harcourt he took courses in physics and received his first formal instruction in mathematics.
In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nanes, and persecution of the Protestants, known as Huguenots, resulted in de Moivre’s imprisonment for his religious affiliation. When set free on April 27, 1688, he emigrated to London, England where he sought an academic post. However, as a foreigner, he was unable to secure a position and supported himself by tutoring students and teaching in the coffee houses of London.
Shortly after arriving in London, Abraham secured a copy of Newton’s newly published Principia. Recognizing its deep significance, he studied it in depth and became a strong proponent of the newly invented calculus. By 1697, Abraham de Moivre had befriended Halley and Newton and his stature as a first-rate mathematician was recognized, by his election as a fellow of the Royal Society. Yet, prejudice in England against foreigners prevented him from receiving a university post.
In the decades that followed, de Moivre toiled on, discovering his famous equation:
in 1722 and Stirling’s formula in 1730. In 1733, he approximated the binomial distribution, where there are a large number of possible outcomes, by the so-called normal distribution defined by the equation:
In spite of discovering these remarkable milestones in mathematics, Abraham de Moivre lived in poverty, scratching out a living by tutoring students and playing chess for money in coffee houses. On observing that he was sleeping 15 minutes longer each night, he summed the arithmetic progression, and predicted that he would die on the day that he slept for 24 hours. His prediction was proved correct when he died on November 27, 1754.
