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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] This is one derivation of the particular Gaussian ...
The Doctrine of Chances was the first textbook on probability theory, written by 18th-century French mathematician Abraham de Moivre and first published in 1718. [1] De Moivre wrote in English because he resided in England at the time, having fled France to escape the persecution of Huguenots.
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.
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.
The simplest case of a normal distribution is known as the standard normal distribution or unit normal distribution. This is a special case when μ = 0 {\textstyle \mu =0} and σ 2 = 1 {\textstyle \sigma ^{2}=1} , and it is described by this probability density function (or density): φ ( z ) = e − z 2 2 2 π . {\displaystyle \varphi (z ...
Abraham de Moivre originally discovered this type of integral in 1733, while Gauss published the precise integral in 1809, [1] attributing its discovery to Laplace. The integral has a wide range of applications. For example, with a slight change of variables it is used to compute the normalizing constant of the normal distribution.
In modern terminology this value is the median. The first example of what later became known as the normal curve was studied by Abraham de Moivre who plotted this curve on November 12, 1733. [14] de Moivre was studying the number of heads that occurred when a 'fair' coin was tossed.
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 ...