Abraham de Moivre

Abraham de Moivre (26 May 1667 in Vitry-le-Franois,

Champagne, France 27 November 1754 in London,
England; French pronunciation: [abaam d mwav]) was
a French mathematician known for de Moivres formula, one of those that link complex numbers and
trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution
and probability theory. 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.

geon who, though middle class believed in the value of

education. Though Abraham de Moivres parents were
Protestant, he rst attended Christian Brothers Catholic
school in Vitry, which was unusually tolerant given religious tensions in France at the time. When he was eleven,
his parents sent him to the Protestant Academy at Sedan,
where he spent four years studying Greek under Jacques
du Rondel. The Protestant Academy of Sedan had been
founded in 1579 at the initiative of Franoise de Bourbon,
the widow of Henri-Robert de la Marck.

De Moivre wrote a book on probability theory, The Doctrine of Chances, said to have been prized by gamblers.
De Moivre rst discovered Binets formula, the closedform expression for Fibonacci numbers linking the nth
power of the golden ratio to the nth Fibonacci number.

In 1682 the Protestant Academy at Sedan was suppressed,

and de Moivre enrolled to study logic at Saumur for two
years. Although mathematics was not part of his course
work, de Moivre read several works on mathematics on
his own including Elements de Mathematiques by Father
Prestet and a short treatise on games of chance, De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae, by Christiaan Huygens. In 1684,
de Moivre moved to Paris to study physics, and for the
rst time had formal mathematics training with private
lessons from Jacques Ozanam.

Life

Religious persecution in France became severe when

King Louis XIV issued the Edict of Fontainebleau in
1685, which revoked the Edict of Nantes, that had given
substantial rights to French Protestants. It forbade Protestant worship and required that all children be baptized by
Catholic priests. De Moivre was sent to the Prieure de
Saint-Martin, a school that the authorities sent Protestant
children to for indoctrination into Catholicism.
It is unclear when de Moivre left the Prieure de SaintMartin and moved to England, since the records of the
Prieure de Saint-Martin indicate that he left the school in
1688, but de Moivre and his brother presented themselves
as Huguenots admitted to the Savoy Church in London on
August 28, 1687.

1.2 Middle years

By the time he arrived in London, de Moivre was a competent mathematician with a good knowledge of many of
the standard texts. To make a living, de Moivre became a
private tutor of mathematics, visiting his pupils or teachDoctrine of chances, 1761
ing in the coee houses of London. De Moivre continued his studies of mathematics after visiting the Earl of
Devonshire and seeing Newtons recent book, Principia
Mathematica. Looking through the book, he realized that
1.1 Early years
it was far deeper than the books that he had studied previAbraham de Moivre was born in Vitry in Champagne on ously, and he became determined to read and understand
May 26, 1667. His father, Daniel de Moivre, was a sur- it. However, as he was required to take extended walks
1

2 PROBABILITY

around London to travel between his students, de Moivre 1.3 Later years
had little time for study, so he tore pages from the book
and carried them around in his pocket to read between
De Moivre continued studying the elds of probability
lessons.
and mathematics until his death in 1754 and several addiAccording to a possibly apocryphal story, Newton, in the tional papers were published after his death. As he grew
later years of his life, used to refer people posing mathe- older, he became increasingly lethargic and needed longer
matical questions to him to de Moivre, saying, He knows sleeping hours. He noted that he was sleeping an extra 15
all these things better than I do.[1]
minutes each night and correctly calculated the date of his
By 1692, de Moivre became friends with Edmond Halley death as the day when the sleep time reached 24 hours,
[6]
and soon after with Isaac Newton himself. In 1695, Hal- November 27, 1754. He died in London and his body
ley communicated de Moivres rst mathematics paper, was buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields, although his body
which arose from his study of uxions in the Principia was later moved.
Mathematica, to the Royal Society. This paper was published in the Philosophical Transactions that same year.
Shortly after publishing this paper, de Moivre also generalized Newtons noteworthy binomial theorem into the
multinomial theorem. The Royal Society became apprised of this method in 1697, and it made de Moivre
a member two months later.
After de Moivre had been accepted, Halley encouraged
him to turn his attention to astronomy. In 1705, de
Moivre discovered, intuitively, that the centripetal force
of any planet is directly related to its distance from the
centre of the forces and reciprocally related to the product of the diameter of the evolute and the cube of the
perpendicular on the tangent. In other words, if a planet,
M, follows an elliptical orbit around a focus F and has a
point P where PM is tangent to the curve and FPM is
a right angle so that FP is the perpendicular to the tangent, then the centripetal force at point P is proportional
to FM/(R*(FP)3 ) where R is the radius of the curvature
at M. The mathematician Johann Bernoulli proved this
formula in 1710.

2 Probability

Despite these successes, de Moivre was unable to obtain an appointment to a chair of mathematics at any
university, which would have released him from his dependence on time-consuming tutoring that burdened him
more than it did most other mathematicians of the time.
At least a part of the reason was a bias against his French
origins.[2][3][4]

De Moivre pioneered the development of analytic geometry and the theory of probability by expanding upon the
work of his predecessors, particularly Christiaan Huygens and several members of the Bernoulli family. He
also produced the second textbook on probability theory, The Doctrine of Chances: a method of calculating
the probabilities of events in play. (The rst book about
games of chance, Liber de ludo aleae (On Casting the Die),
was written by Girolamo Cardano in the 1560s, but it was
not published until 1663.) This book came out in four
editions, 1711 in Latin, and in English in 1718, 1738,
and 1756. In the later editions of his book, de Moivre
included his unpublished result of 1733, which is the rst
statement of an approximation to the binomial distribution in terms of what we now call the normal or Gaussian
function.[7] This was the rst method of nding the probability of the occurrence of an error of a given size when
that error is expressed in terms of the variability of the
distribution as a unit, and the rst identication of the calculation of probable error. In addition, he applied these
theories to gambling problems and actuarial tables.

In November 1697 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal

Society[5] and in 1712 was appointed to a commission set
up by the society, alongside MM. Arbuthnot, Hill, Halley, Jones, Machin, Burnet, Robarts, Bonet, Aston, and
Taylor to review the claims of Newton and Leibniz as to
who discovered calculus. The full details of the controversy can be found in the Leibniz and Newton calculus
controversy article.

An expression commonly found in probability is n! but

before the days of calculators calculating n! for a large
n was time consuming. In 1733 de Moivre proposed the
formula for estimating a factorial as n! = cnn+1/2 en . He
obtained an approximate expression for the constant c
but it was James Stirling who found that c was (2) .[8]
Therefore, Stirlings approximation is as much due to de
Moivre as it is to Stirling.

Throughout his life de Moivre remained poor. It is reported that he was a regular customer of Slaughters Coffee House, St. Martins Lane at Cranbourn Street, where
he earned a little money from playing chess.

De Moivre also published an article called Annuities

upon Lives in which he revealed the normal distribution of the mortality rate over a persons age. From this
he produced a simple formula for approximating the revenue produced by annual payments based on a persons
age. This is similar to the types of formulas used by insurance companies today. See also de MoivreLaplace
theorem

2.1

Priority regarding the Poisson distribution

Some results on the Poisson distribution were rst introduced by de Moivre in De Mensura Sortis seu; de
Probabilitate Eventuum in Ludis a Casu Fortuito Pendentibus in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, p. 219.[9] As a result, some authors have argued
that the Poisson distribution should bear the name of de
Moivre[10][11]

[5] Library and Archive Catalogue. The Royal Society. Retrieved 3 October 2010.
[6] Cajori, Florian (1991). History of Mathematics (5 ed.).
American Mathematical Society. p. 229. ISBN
9780821821022.
[7] See:
Abraham De Moivre (November 12, 1733)
Approximatio ad summam terminorum binomii (a+b)n in seriem expansi (self-published
pamphlet), 7 pages.
English translation: A. De Moivre, The Doctrine of
Chances , 2nd ed. (London, England: H. Woodfall, 1738), pp. 235-243.

De Moivres formula

[8] Pearson, Karl. Historical note on the origin of the

normal curve of errors. Biometrika 16: 402404.
doi:10.1093/biomet/16.3-4.402.

In 1707 de Moivre derived:

[9] Johnson, N.L., Kotz, S., Kemp, A.W. (1993) Univariate

cos x = 12 (cos(nx)+i sin(nx))1/n + 12 (cos(nx)i sin(nx))1/n
[12]

Discrete distributions (2nd edition). Wiley. ISBN 0-47154897-9, p157

which he was able to prove for all positive integers n.

In 1722 he suggested it in the more well known form of [10] Stigler, Stephen M. Poisson on the Poisson distribution.
de Moivres Formula:
Statistics & Probability Letters 1.1 (1982): 33-35.

(cos x + i sin x)n = cos(nx) + i sin(nx).

[11] Hald, Anders, Abraham de Moivre, and Bruce McClintock. A. de Moivre:'De Mensura Sortis or'On the
Measurement of Chance'. International Statistical Review/Revue Internationale de Statistique (1984): 229-262

In 1749 Euler proved this formula for any real n using

[12] Smith, David Eugene (1959), A Source Book in MathematEulers formula, which makes the proof quite straightics, Volume 3, Courier Dover Publications, p. 444, ISBN
forward. This formula is important because it relates
9780486646909.
complex numbers and trigonometry. Additionally, this
formula allows the derivation of useful expressions for
cos(nx) and sin(nx) in terms of cos(x) and sin(x).

5 References

Notes

[1] Bellhouse, David R. (2011). Abraham De Moivre: Setting the Stage for Classical Probability and Its Applications.
London: Taylor & Francis. p. 99. ISBN 978-1-56881349-3.
[2] Coughlin, Raymond F.; Zitarelli, David E. (1984). The
ascent of mathematics. McGraw-Hill. p. 437. ISBN 007-013215-1. Unfortunately, because he was not British,
De Moivre was never able to obtain a university teaching
position.

See de Moivres Miscellanea Analytica (London:

1730) p 2642.
H. J. R. Murray, 1913. History of Chess. Oxford
University Press: 846.
Schneider, I., 2005, The doctrine of chances in
Grattan-Guinness, I., ed., Landmark Writings in
Western Mathematics. Elsevier: 10520

6 Further reading

[3] Jungnickel, Christa; McCormmach, Russell (1996).

Cavendish. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 220. American Philosophical Society. p. 52. ISBN
9780871692207. Well connected in mathematical circles
and highly regarded for his work, he still could not get a
good job. Even his conversion to the Church of England
in 1705 could not alter the fact that he was an alien.

de Moivre, Abraham at the Wayback Machine

(archived December 19, 2007)

[4] Tanton, James Stuart (2005). Encyclopedia of Mathematics. Infobase Publishing. p. 122. ISBN 9780816051243.
He had hoped to receive a faculty position in mathematics
but, as a foreigner, was never oered such an appointment.

Excerpt from Trigonometric Delights

The Doctrine of Chance at MathPages.

Biography (PDF), Matthew Maty's Biography of
Abraham De Moivre, Translated, Annotated and
Augmented.

de Moivre, On the Law of Normal Probability

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