Moivre, Abraham de

Moivre, Abraham de

(äbrä-äm`də mwä`vrə), 1667–1754, French-English mathematician. He fled to England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He was called upon by the Royal Society to help decide the issue between Newton and Leibniz on the priority of the invention of the differential calculus. De Moivre made important contributions to trigonometry and to the theory of probabilities, on which he published Doctrine of Chances (1718). There are three mathematical theorems which bear his name.