Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754)

Abraham Moivre was born to a surgeon but was not wealthy nor part of the nobility. He and his family were Protestants in Catholic France. When the Edict of Nantes was revoked in October 1685, he was imprisoned. Freed in April 1688, he immediately fled to England. He added the de in his name when he arrived in England, likely to appear noble. He attempted to network with other English mathematicians by first getting to know Edmond Halley (1656-1742) and hoped to enter the noble mathematician social circle. Eventually, he succeeded and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1697. Because he was from France, his Englishman mathematician colleagues did not go out of their way to help him as much as they would a fellow Englishman. He never acquired wealth from his mathematical discoveries. Instead, he noted that he spent his life going about the city tutoring when he would have preferred to have a chance to sit and work to save up money.

From the time he moved to England, he began tutoring mathematics. He was mainly self-taught and gained much of his mathematical knowledge from reading. At a student's house, he saw Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica and decided to buy a copy. He tore out the pages to read while he was walking to and from tutoring appointments. He became a lifelong supporter of Newton and his work. Newton, in turn, was known to turn potential students to de Moivre because he was a better tutor. De Moivre kept up his clientele by teaching his students what they were most interested in learning, which influenced him to study games of chance.

His greatest published work was Doctrine of Chances (1718) which included worked probability problems ordered from easiest to hardest with explanations. He was able to determine the fallacy of the notion of luck, but there was still some confusion about the nature of chance compared to the religious belief that a deity determines the outcomes of all events. David (1962) quotes de Moivre,

We may imagine Chance and Design to be as it were in Competition with each other for the production of some sorts of Events, and may calculate what probability there is… From this last Consideration we may learn in many Cases how to distinguish the Events which are the effect of Chance, from those which are produced by Design (p. 167).

In the Doctrine of Chances, de Moivre contributed to current knowledge about permutations and combinations and the development of actuarial mathematics in relation to life insurance. He proved that the central limit theorem holds for numbers from simple games of chance. No further proof of the central limit theorem was made for 150 years. Through that time, its truth was assumed, and this assumption was required to make the mathematics of other theorems tractable. He used the idea that there is unpredictability in the short term and stability in the long term as a proof that God exists. Proving the existence of God was one of the major goals for many scientists and mathematicians at the time, so after connecting his discoveries to his beliefs, he may have said that he had completed his work.