Abraham de Moivre

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Abraham de Moivre
Abraham de Moivre
Born26 May 1667
Died27 November 1754(1754-11-27) (aged 87)
NationalityFrench
Alma materAcademy of Saumur
Collège de Harcourt
Known forDe Moivre's formula
Theorem of de Moivre–Laplace
Scientific career
Fieldsmathematician
Academic advisorsJacques Ozanam
InfluencesIsaac Newton

Abraham de Moivre was a French mathematician. He is known for his works on probability theory. He also did a lot of research in trigonometry.De Moivre's formula connects complex numbers and trigonometry. As he was a Huguenot, he was forced to emigrate to England. He 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.

De Moivre wrote a book on probability theory, The Doctrine of Chances, said to have been prized by gamblers. De Moivre first discovered Binet's formula, the closed-form expression for Fibonacci numbers linking the nth power of the golden ratio φ to the nth Fibonacci number.