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Abraham de Moivre

Abraham de Moivre

1667 CE1754 CE · Vitry-le-François

Abraham de Moivre (French pronunciation: [abʁaam də mwavʁ]; 26 May 1667 – 27 November 1754) was a French mathematician known for de Moivre's formula, a formula that links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory. He moved to England at a young age due to the religious persecution of Huguenots in France which reached a climax in 1685 with the Edict of Fontainebleau. 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. De Moivre wrote a book on probability theory, The Doctrine of Chances, said to have been prized by gamblers. De Moivre first discovered Binet's formula, the closed-form expression for Fibonacci numbers linking the nth power of the golden ratio φ to the nth Fibonacci number. He also was the first to postulate the central limit theorem, a cornerstone of probability theory, of which he proved a special case.

Adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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Stop 1 of 2Born

Vitry-le-FrançoisויטריChampagne, France

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About Vitry-le-François

Vitry (the medieval Vitry, in the Champagne region of northern France) was the home of Rabbi Simchah of Vitry, an eleventh-to-twelfth-century Talmudist and close disciple of Rashi. He compiled the Machzor Vitry, an important early compendium of liturgical law and custom that also preserves responsa of Rashi and other authorities.

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Related figuresIsaac NewtonSuggested by shared subject matter, not a documented teaching relationship.