Abraham de moivre biography for kids

He moved to England at a young age due to the religious persecution of Huguenots in France which reached a climax in with the Edict of Fontainebleau. 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.

He also was the first to postulate the central limit theorem , a cornerstone of probability theory. His father, Daniel de Moivre, was a surgeon who believed in the value of education. Though Abraham de Moivre's parents were Protestant, he first attended Christian Brothers' Catholic school in Vitry, which was unusually tolerant given religious tensions in France at the time.

When he was eleven, his parents sent him to the Protestant Academy at Sedan , where he spent four years studying Greek under Jacques du Rondel. In the Protestant Academy at Sedan was suppressed, and de Moivre enrolled to study logic at Saumur for two years. In , de Moivre moved to Paris to study physics, and for the first time had formal mathematics training with private lessons from Jacques Ozanam.

It forbade Protestant worship and required that all children be baptised by Catholic priests. It is unclear when de Moivre left the Prieure de Saint-Martin and moved to England, since the records of the Prieure de Saint-Martin indicate that he left the school in , but de Moivre and his brother presented themselves as Huguenots admitted to the Savoy Church in London on 28 August By the time he arrived in London, de Moivre was a competent mathematician with a good knowledge of many of the standard texts.

To make a living, de Moivre became a private tutor of mathematics , visiting his pupils or teaching in the coffee houses of London.

Abraham de moivre contributions to mathematics

De Moivre continued his studies of mathematics after visiting the Earl of Devonshire and seeing Newton's recent book, Principia Mathematica. Looking through the book, he realised that it was far deeper than the books that he had studied previously, and he became determined to read and understand it. However, as he was required to take extended walks around London to travel between his students, de Moivre had little time for study, so he tore pages from the book and carried them around in his pocket to read between lessons.