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In mathematics, de Moivre's formula (also known as de Moivre's theorem and de Moivre's identity) states that for any real number x and integer n it is the case that ( + ) = + , where i is the imaginary unit (i 2 = −1).
de Moivre's theorem may be: de Moivre's formula, a trigonometric identity; Theorem of de Moivre–Laplace, a central limit theorem This page was last edited on 28 ...
Abraham de Moivre was born in Vitry-le-François in Champagne on 26 May 1667. 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 the Christian Brothers' Catholic school in Vitry, which was unusually tolerant given religious tensions in France at the time.
The theorem appeared in the second edition of The Doctrine of Chances by Abraham de Moivre, published in 1738. Although de Moivre did not use the term "Bernoulli trials", he wrote about the probability distribution of the number of times "heads" appears when a coin is tossed 3600 times. [1]
Published in 1738 by Woodfall and running for 258 pages, the second edition of de Moivre's book introduced the concept of normal distributions as approximations to binomial distributions. In effect de Moivre proved a special case of the central limit theorem. Sometimes his result is called the theorem of de Moivre–Laplace.
de Moivre's illustration of his piecewise linear approximation. De Moivre's law first appeared in his 1725 Annuities upon Lives, the earliest known example of an actuarial textbook. [6] Despite the name now given to it, de Moivre himself did not consider his law (he called it a "hypothesis") to be a true description of the pattern of human ...
De Moivre's most notable achievement in probability was the discovery of the first instance of central limit theorem, by which he was able to approximate the binomial distribution with the normal distribution. [16]
This approximation, known as de Moivre–Laplace theorem, is a huge time-saver when undertaking calculations by hand (exact calculations with large n are very onerous); historically, it was the first use of the normal distribution, introduced in Abraham de Moivre's book The Doctrine of Chances in 1738.