Abraham de Moivre
Abraham de Moivre ( born May 26, 1667 in Vitry -le- François, † November 27, 1754 in London) was a French mathematician who is best known for the set of Moivre.
Life and work
De Moivre visited from 1678 to 1681 the Protestant school in Sedan, studied from 1682 to 1684 in Saumur logic and mathematics, and took private lessons in Paris in 1684 with Jacques Ozanam. After Revokationsedikt of 1685 he was held in Paris in an abbey established in order to persuade him to conversion. On April 27, 1688 he was released and fled to England.
He made his way as a private tutor through, studied and mastered the way Newton's Principia Mathematica and published from 1695 to work on Newton's fluxions method of calculus, where he made the acquaintance of Edmond Halley (Secretary of the Royal Society ) and Isaac Newton. Later, he was a close friend of Newton and discussed with him was frequently at his house or at the coffee -house, where he used to reside. 1697 he was appointed a member of the Royal Society. His attempts to obtain a professorship on the mainland ( where Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz began for him), failed, as in England (despite the intercession of Newton and Halley ). De Moivre's life was in poverty.
From 1708 he worked after Pierre Remond de Mont Mort (with whom he got into a priority dispute ) and Christian Huygens mainly with investigations on the theory of probability from gambling bills, from which in 1718 published The Doctrine of Chances - a method for calculating the probabilities of events emerged in play. He had a first Latin version in 1711 in the Transactions of the Royal Society published ( De Mensura sortis ). After the discovery of the limit theorem for binomial distributions ( 1733) he gave in 1738 a second edition of his Doctrine out. 1756 a third edition appeared posthumously. The second edition of the Doctrine also contained de Moivre studies on mortality and pension issues that had already been investigated Edmond Halley for applications in life insurance and what de Moivre 1724 a writing published ( Annuities upon Lives ), which he einarbeitete in the new edition. The book was one of the most important precursors to the textbook of probability theory by Pierre Simon Laplace, who summarized the theory at the end of the 18th century and raised to a new level.
In Miscellanea analytica de Moivre presented his theory of recurrent series dar. this 1730 published book gives an overview of the work of de Moivre in the analysis together with the applications of probability theory and astronomy. Here can be found the first time the Stirling formula in its asymptotic approximation to the binomial distribution by the normal distribution. He is also a solution of the angular distribution problem, which is an equivalent of him " Moivrescher set " named theorem bypassing imaginary sizes. He published this sentence, however, already in the work of 1722. Particular it follows a formula for the square root in the complex numbers. Parts of the Miscellanea Analytica, he also worked in the second edition of his Doctrines of a chance.
De Moivre was in 1735 a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, and in 1754 - five months before his death - honored him and the Academy of Sciences for his achievements as a mathematician with the membership.
The asteroid ( 28729 ) Moivre was named after him.