Abraham de Moivre

"Moivre" redirects here; for the French commune see Moivre, Marne.

Abraham de Moivre
Abraham de Moivre
Born	26 May 1667 Vitry-le-François, Champagne, France
Died	27 November 1754 (aged 87) London, England
Residence	England
Nationality	French
Fields	Mathematician
Alma mater	Academy of Saumur Collège de Harcourt
Doctoral advisor	Jacques Ozanam
Known for	De Moivre's formula Theorem of de Moivre–Laplace
Influences	Isaac Newton
Religious stance	Calvinist

Abraham de Moivre (26 May 1667 in Vitry-le-François, Champagne, France – 27 November 1754 in London, England; French pronunciation: [abʁam də mwavʁ]) was a French mathematician famous for de Moivre's formula, which links complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1697, and was a friend of Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and James Stirling. Among his fellow Huguenot exiles in England, he was a colleague of the editor and translator Pierre des Maizeaux.

The social status of de Moivre’s is unclear, but his father, a surgeon, was able to send him to the Protestant academy at Sedan (1678–82). De Moivre studied logic at the Academy of Saumur (1682–84), attended the Collège de Harcourt in Paris (1684), and studied privately with Jacques Ozanam (1684–85). It appears that de Moivre never received a college degree.

A Calvinist, de Moivre left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) and spent the remainder of his life in England.

Throughout his life de Moivre remained poor. It is reported that he was a regular customer of Slaughter's Coffee House, St. Martin's Lane at Cranbourn Street, where he earned a little money from playing chess.

Abraham de Moivre died in London and was buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields, although his body was later moved.

De Moivre wrote a book on probability theory, The Doctrine of Chances, said to have been prized by gamblers. It is reported in all seriousness that de Moivre correctly predicted the day of his own death. Noting that he was sleeping 15 minutes longer each day, De Moivre surmised that he would die on the day he would sleep for 24 hours. A simple mathematical calculation quickly yielded the date, 27 November 1754. He did indeed die on that day.^[1]

De Moivre first discovered Binet's formula, the closed-form expression for Fibonacci numbers linking the nth power of φ to the nth Fibonacci number.

Life

Early years

Abraham de Moivre was born in Vitry in Champagne on May 26, 1667. His father, Daniel de Moivre, was a surgeon and although middle class he believed in the value of education. Although his parents were Protestant, he first attended the Catholic school of the Christian Brothers in Vitry which was unusually tolerant given the 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 Du Rondel. In 1682 the Protestant Academy at Sedan was suppressed and de Moivre enrolled to study logic at Saumur for two years. Although mathematics was not part of his course work, de Moivre read several mathematical works on his own including Elements de mathematiques by Father Prestet and a short treatise on games of chance, De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae, by Christiaan Huygens. In 1684 he moved to Paris to study physics and for the first time had formal mathematics training with private lessons from Jacques Ozanam.

Religious persecution in France became severe when King Louis XIV passed the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685 which revoked the Edict of Nantes, that had given substantial rights to French Protestants. It forbade Protestant worship and required all children to be baptized by Catholic priests. De Moivre was sent to the Prieure de Saint-Martin, a school to which Protestant children were sent by the authorities for indoctrination into Catholicism. It is unclear when de Moivre left the Prieure de Saint-Martin and moved to England as the records of the Prieure de Saint-Martin indicate that he left the school in 1688 but de Moivre and his brother presented themselves as Huguenots to be admitted to the Savoy Church in London on August 28, 1687.

Middle years

By the time he arrived in London, de Moivre was a competent mathematician with a good knowledge of many of the standard texts. In order to obtain a living, de Moivre became a private tutor of mathematics, visiting his pupils or teaching in the coffee houses of London. De Moivre continued his studies of mathematics after visiting the Earl of Devonshire and seeing Newton’s recent book, Principia. After looking through the book he immediately realized that the book was far deeper than those which he had studied and he was determined to read and understand it. However, he was required to take extended walks around London to travel between his tutees, de Moivre had little time for study so he would tear pages from the book and carry them around in his pocket to read in the times between lessons. Eventually de Moivre become so knowledgeable about the material that Newton would refer questions to him saying, “Go to Mr. de Moivre; he knows these things better than I do.”^[2]

By 1692, de Moivre became friends with Edmond Halley and soon after Isaac Newton himself. In 1695, Halley communicated de Moivre’s first mathematics paper, which arose from his study of fluxions in the Principia, to the Royal Society. This paper was published in the Philosophical Transactions that same year. Shortly after publishing this paper de Moivre also generalized Newton’s famous Binomial Theorem into the Multinomial Theorem. The Royal Society became apprised of this method in 1697 and made de Moivre a member two months later.

After being accepted, Halley encouraged de Moivre to turn his attention to astronomy. In 1705, Mr. De Moivre discovered, intuitively, that “the centripetal force of any planet is directly related to its distance from the centre of the forces and reciprocally related to the product of the diameter of the evolute and the cube of the perpendicular on the tangent”. In other words, a planet, M, which follows an elliptical orbit around a focus F and has a point P where PM is tangent to the curve and FPM is a right angle so that FP is the perpendicular to the tangent then the centripetal force at point P is proportional to F*M/(R*(F*P)³) where R is the radius of the curvature at M. Johann Bernoulli proved this formula in 1710.

Despite these successes, de Moivre was unable to obtain an appointment to a Chair of Mathematics at a university which would release him from his dependence on the time consuming tutoring that burdened his life to a greater extent than it did most other mathematicians of the time. At least a part of the reason was a bias against his French origins.

In 1712, de Moivre was appointed to a commission set up by the Royal Society alongside, MM. Arbuthnot, Hill, Halley, Jones, Machin, Burnet, Robarts, Bonet, Aston, and Taylor to review the claims of Newton and Leibniz as to who discovered calculus. The full details of the controversy can be found in the Leibniz and Newton calculus controversy article.

Later years

De Moivre continued studying the fields of probability and mathematics until his death in 1754 and several additional papers were published after his death. As he grew older, he became increasingly lethargic and needed longer sleeping hours. He noted that he was sleeping an extra 15 minutes each night and correctly calculated the date of his death on the day when the additional sleep time accumulated to 24 hours, November 27, 1754.

Probability

De Moivre pioneered the development of analytic geometry and the theory of probability by expanding upon the work of his predecessors, particularly Christiaan Huyges and several members of the Bernoulli family. He also produced the first textbook on probability theory, The Doctrine of Chances: a method of calculating the probabilities of events in play. This book came out in four editions, 1711 in Latin, and 1718, 1738 and 1756 in English. In the later editions of his book, de Moivre gives the first statement of the formula for the normal distribution curve, the first method of finding the probability of the occurrence of an error of a given size when that error is expressed in terms of the variability of the distribution as a unit, and the first identification of the probable error calculation. Additionally, he applied these theories to gambling problems and actuarial tables.

An expression commonly found in probability is n! but before the days of calculators calculating n! for a large n was time consuming. In 1733 de Moivre proposed the formula for estimating a factorial as n! = cn^n+1/2e⁻ⁿ. He obtained an expression for the constant c but it was James Stirling who found that c was √(2π) ^[3]. Therefore, Stirling's approximation is as much due to de Moivre as it is to Stirling.

De Moivre also published an article called Annuities upon Lives in which he revealed the normal distribution of the mortality rate over a person’s age. From this he produced a simple formula for approximating the revenue produced by annual payments based on a person’s age. This is similar to the types of formulas used by insurance companies today. See also de Moivre–Laplace theorem

De Moivre’s formula

In 1707 de Moivre derived:

which he was able to prove for all positive integral values of n. In 1722 he suggested it in the more well known form of de Moivre's Formula:

In 1749 Euler proved this formula for any real n using Euler's formula which makes the proof quite straightforward. This formula is important because it relates complex numbers and trigonometry. Additionally, this formula allows the derivation of useful expressions for cos(nx) and sin(nx) in terms of cos(x) and sin(x).

Notes

1. ^ O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Abraham de Moivre", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/De_Moivre.html .
2. ^ Isaac Todhunter, History of the Mathematical Theory of Probability from the Time of Pascal to that of Lagrange, 1865, p. 135.
3. ^ Pearson, Karl, "Historical note on the origin of the normal curve of errors", Biometrika 16: 402–404 

References

• See de Moivre's Miscellanea Analytica (London: 1730) p 26–42.
• H. J. R. Murray, 1913. History of Chess. Oxford University Press: 846.
• Schneider, I., 2005, "The doctrine of chances" in Grattan-Guinness, I., ed., Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics. Elsevier: 105–20

External links

• de Moivre, Abraham
• Abraham de Moivre from the 1911 Britannica
• The Doctrine of Chance at MathPages.
• Maty’s Biography of Abraham De Moivre, Translated, Annotated and Augmented
• Excerpt from Trigonometric Delights
• de Moivre, On the Law of Normal Probability