Abraham De Moivre was born in Vitry le François, Champaigne, France in 1667. As a young man, he left France for England to escape religious persecution. He worked in England as a tutor for the rest of his life. De Moivre was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1707.
De Moivre was a close friend and associate of Issac Newton, helping to establish Newton as the inventor of the calculus. De Moivre wrote Miscellanea Analytica in 1730, investigating infinite series and complex analysis. Students of calculus remember his name from the theorem that gives the powers of a complex number in terms of its polar coordinate (complex exponential) representation.
De Moivre is considered one of the founders of the theory of probability, because of his seminal work The Doctrine of Chances, first published in 1718. In 1733, he derived the normal approximation to the binomial distribution, the earliest version of the central limit theorem.