Abraham de Moivre

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Abraham de Moivre never held a university chair. He spent nearly seventy years in England as a Huguenot exile, tutoring students in mathematics for a living and, in the coffeehouses of London, consulting for gamblers who wanted to know their real odds. It is a strange origin story for a foundational result in statistics, but it is the true one: the normal distribution, the bell curve that today underlies everything from standardized testing to manufacturing quality control, first appears in a 1733 pamphlet de Moivre wrote to answer exactly that kind of practical question, working out how a binomial distribution, the outcome of many independent coin-flip-like trials, behaves as the number of trials grows large. He proved only the special, symmetric case; it would take Laplace, working from the other end of the eighteenth century, and then Lyapunov, in 1901, to state and prove the theorem in the full generality now taught as the central limit theorem. De Moivre's own name survives elsewhere too, in de Moivre's formula linking the powers of complex numbers to trigonometry, a small piece of algebra every later mathematician has used without necessarily knowing whose it was. He died, according to a story his own contemporaries told about him, on the exact day he had calculated his sleep would finally reach twenty-four hours a night. Whether or not that reasoning is exactly true, the coincidence of the date is not in dispute.