In Abraham de Moivre continued his studies at the Collège de Harcourt where he took courses in physics and received his first formal mathematics training with private lessons from Jacques Ozanam.
Career
Achievements
Membership
Royal Society
Abraham de Moivre was a member of the Royal Society, the French Academy of Sciences.
French Academy of Sciences
Abraham de Moivre was a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences
Abraham de Moivre was a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (now Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities).
In Abraham de Moivre continued his studies at the Collège de Harcourt where he took courses in physics and received his first formal mathematics training with private lessons from Jacques Ozanam.
Abraham de Moivre was a British mathematician of French origin. He was a pioneer in the development of analytic trigonometry and in the theory of probability.
Background
Abraham de Moivre was born on May 26, 1667, in Vitry-le-françois, Champagne-Ardenne, France to the family of Daniel de Moivre, a provincial surgeon of modest means, assured him of a competent but undistinguished classical education. The family was certainly not well off financially, but a steady income meant that they could not be described as poor. His family belonged to the Huguenot sect, a Protestant group protected since 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, which ensured their limited freedom within the Catholic nation.
Education
Abraham de Moivre was raised as a Protestant, but he first attended a tolerant Christian Brothers' Catholic school in Vitry. When he was 11, his parents sent him to a Protestant Academy at Sedan to study Greek and was educated under Jacques du Rondel but the Academy was closed for religious reasons in 1682, so he studied logic at Saumur until 1684. Although mathematics was not a part of the course that he was studying, de Moivre read mathematics texts in his own time. He continued his studies at the Collège de Harcourt where he took courses in physics and received his first formal mathematics training with private lessons from Jacques Ozanam.
Religious persecution of Protestants became very serious after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, leading to the expulsion of the Huguenots. At this time de Moivre was imprisoned for his religious beliefs in the priory of St Martin. It is unclear how long he was kept there, since Roman Catholic biographers indicate that soon after this he emigrated to England while his Protestant biographers say that he was imprisoned until 27 April 1688 after which he traveled to England. After arriving in London he became a private tutor of mathematics, visiting the pupils whom he taught and also teaching in the coffee houses of London.
By 1692 de Moivre had got to know Halley, who was at this time assistant secretary of the Royal Society, and soon after that he met Newton and became friendly with him. His first mathematics paper arose from his study of fluxions in the Principia and in March 1695 Halley communicated this first paper Method of fluxions to the Royal Society. In 1697 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.
In 1710 de Moivre was appointed to the Commission set up by the Royal Society to review the rival claims of Newton and Leibniz to be the discovery of the calculus. His appointment to this Commission was due to his friendship with Newton. It is also interesting that de Moivre should be given this important position despite finding it impossible to gain a university post.
De Moivre pioneered the development of analytic geometry and the theory of probability. He published The Doctrine of Chance: A method of calculating the probabilities of events in play in 1718 although a Latin version had been presented to the Royal Society and published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1711. In fact, it was Francis Robartes, who later became the Earl of Radnor, who suggested to de Moivre that he present a broader picture of the principles of probability theory than those which had been presented by Montmort in Essay d'analyse sur les jeux de hazard (1708). Clearly this work by Montmort and that by Huygens which de Moivre had read while at Saumur, contained the problems which de Moivre attacked in his work and this led Montmort to enter into a dispute with de Moivre concerning originality and priority. Unlike the Newton-Leibniz dispute which de Moivre had judged, the argument with Montmort appears to have been settled amicably. The definition of statistical independence appears in this book together with many problems with dice and other games.
The 1756 edition of The Doctrine of Chance contained what is probably de Moivre's most significant contribution to this area, namely the approximation to the binomial distribution by the normal distribution in the case of a large number of trials. De Moivre first published this result in a Latin pamphlet dated 13 November 1733 aiming to improve on Jacob Bernoulli's law of large numbers.
In Miscellanea Analytica (1730) appears Stirling's formula (wrongly attributed to Stirling) which de Moivre used in 1733 to derive the normal curve as an approximation to the binomial. In the second edition of the book in 1738 de Moivre gives credit to Stirling for an improvement to the formula.
Despite de Moivre's scientific eminence, his main income was as a private tutor of mathematics and he died in poverty. Desperate to get a chair in Cambridge he begged Johann Bernoulli to persuade Leibniz to write supporting him. He did so in 1710 explaining to Leibniz that de Moivre was living a miserable life of poverty. Indeed Leibniz had met de Moivre when he had been in London in 1673 and tried to obtain a professorship for de Moivre in Germany, but with no success. Even his influential English friends like Newton and Halley could not help him obtain a university post.
A French Huguenot, de Moivre was jailed as a Protestant upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.
Politics
Not being involved in politics Abraham de Moivre nevertheless suffered from political repressions aimed at Protestants.
Views
By the time he arrived in London de Moivre was a competent mathematician with a good knowledge of many of the standard texts. However after he made a visit to the Earl of Devonshire, carrying with him a letter of introduction, he was shown Newton's Principia. He realized instantly that this was a work far deeper than those which he had studied and decided that he would have to read and understand this masterpiece. He purchased a copy, cut up the pages so that he could carry a few with him at all times, and as he traveled from one pupil to the next he read them. Although this was not the ideal environment in which to study the Principia, it is a mark of de Moivre's abilities that he was quickly able to master the difficult work. De Moivre had hoped for a chair of mathematics, but foreigners were at a disadvantage in England so although he now was free from religious discrimination, he still suffered discrimination as a Frenchman in England. We describe below some attempts to procure a chair for him.
De Moivre also investigated mortality statistics and the foundation of the theory of annuities. An innovative piece of work by Halley had been the production of mortality tables, based on five years of data, for the city of Breslau which he published in 1693. It was one of the earliest works to relate mortality and age in a population and was highly influential in the production of actuarial tables in life insurance. It is almost certain that de Moivre's friendship with Halley led to his interest in annuities and he published Annuities on lives in 1724. Later editions appeared in 1743, 1750, 1752 and 1756.
Membership
Abraham de Moivre was a member of the Royal Society, the French Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (now Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities).
Royal Society
,
United Kingdom
French Academy of Sciences
,
France
Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences
,
Brandenburg-Prussia
Personality
De Moivre, like Cardan, is famed for predicting the day of his own death. He found that he was sleeping 15 minutes longer each night and summing the arithmetic progression, calculated that he would die on the day that he slept for 24 hours.
Physical Characteristics:
As he grew older, de Moivre became increasingly lethargic and needed longer sleeping hours.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton
Connections
Abraham de Moivre was unmarried and spent his closing years in peaceful studies.