Pierre Remond de Montmort

Pierre Remond de Montmort (1678 to 1719) was a French mathematician, born in Paris, whose name was originally just Pierre Remond. His father pressured him to study law, but he rebelled and travelled to England and Germany, returning to France in 1699, when a large inheritance let him buy an estate and take the name de Montmort. He was friendly with several notable mathematicians, especially Nicholas Bernoulli, who collaborated with him while visiting his estate. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1715 while travelling in England, and became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1716. He is known for his book on probability and games of chance, Essay d'analyse sur les jeux de hazard, which was also the first to introduce the combinatorial study of derangements, and for naming Pascal's triangle after Blaise Pascal. He also worked on finite differences, determining in 1713 the sum of n terms of a finite series.