Abraham de Moivre

Abraham de Moivre, who lived from 1667 to 1754, was a French mathematician known for de Moivre's formula, which links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory. Born in Vitry-le-François in Champagne, the son of a surgeon, he was educated at Catholic and Protestant schools before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 pushed him, as a Huguenot, to leave for England. In London he made a living as a private tutor of mathematics, taught himself from Newton's Principia by carrying torn pages in his pocket, and became a friend of Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton. The Royal Society elected him a Fellow in 1697. His book The Doctrine of Chances was prized by gamblers, and he first discovered the closed form for Fibonacci numbers now credited to Binet and was the first to postulate the central limit theorem, proving a special case of it.