Demoivre

Demoivre, Abraham, was born of Protestant parents at Vitry, in France, in 1667. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes forced him to migrate in 1685 to London, where he became the friend of Newton, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. His reputation as a geometrician was so high that he was invited to adjudicate on the claims of Newton and Leibnitz to the invention of the method of fluxions. His strength lay in the application of analytical processes, and his name is associated with a theorem that advanced materially the utility of trigonometry. Three important works were published by him, viz. Analytical Miscellanies, The Doctrine of Chances, and Annuities on Lives. The last contained an enunciation of his well-known hypothesis that of eighty-six persons born one dies every year till all are extinct. It also brought upon him a controversy with Simson, in which he got the worst of the argument. He died in 1754.