Abraham de Moivre

Another sage from our recent past who pondered nature and bequeathed insights. A scholar who lived for 87 years with contributions in the 17th and 18th centuries. Now unknown to many and not always credited for his intuition.

Born in Champagne, the son of a French surgeon who knew the importance of learning, the young de Moivre possessed the energy and intellect to benefit from education, soon studying Greek and logic. Mathematics enticed him, motivating him to read the work of the Dutch genius, Christiaan Huygens. His writing on games of chance may have sparked de Moivre’s enduring interest in probability. Later, in Paris, de Moivre studied physics and received private mathematics lessons.

His disadvantage was to belong to a Huguenot family, therefore Protestants, living in France through a period of Catholic fervour. While the details are murky, the consequence was de Moivre’s arrival in London in 1687 CE, aged around 20. After the Reformation, England had become a haven for Protestants fleeing prejudice or persecution.

Already mathematically adept, to make a living de Moivre began teaching privately around the city, while continuing his own studies. Isaac Newton’s recently published masterpiece, Principia Mathematica, came to his attention. It was immediately apparent that deeper knowledge was essential to comprehend Newton’s erudition. It is recorded that de Moivre tore pages from Principia to read as he navigated London between tutoring appointments. A Frenchman reading Latinised mathematics while walking the streets of England’s capital. Certainly, a good story.

A friend of Edmond Halley and, subsequently, Newton, he was elected to the Royal Society in 1697 CE. Presumably, he would also have become acquainted with Robert Hooke. Through Halley, astronomy also attracted de Moivre.

Though largely forgotten or obscured, his mathematical contributions were many.

• Arguably the originator of the Normal Distribution, later credited to Gauss and Laplace. He applied the distribution to gambling questions and actuarial tables.

• Similarly, the Central Limit Theorem, commonly credited to Laplace, has roots in de Moivre’s ruminations on using the Normal Distribution as an approximation to the Binomial Distribution.

• The Poisson Distribution, a statistical distribution reflecting the endeavours of Simeon Poisson, seems to have been applied by de Moivre a century before.

• Binet’s Formula, relating Fibonacci numbers to the famous Golden Ratio, was previously known to de Moivre.

• An equation linking trigonometry and complex numbers is named de Moivre’s Formula. Some recognition, at least.

Despite a long and noteworthy career, de Moivre remained quite poor, unable to obtain a university post commensurate with his abilities. The help of Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, two luminaries of the era, proved insufficient.

Forced from France by religious bigotry, he probably encountered discrimination in England because of his French origins.

Autres temps, autres mouers, we hope.

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