📝 Original Info
- Title: Matys Biography of Abraham De Moivre, Translated, Annotated and Augmented
- ArXiv ID: 0708.3965
- Date: 2009-09-29
- Authors: Researchers from original ArXiv paper
📝 Abstract
November 27, 2004, marked the 250th anniversary of the death of Abraham De Moivre, best known in statistical circles for his famous large-sample approximation to the binomial distribution, whose generalization is now referred to as the Central Limit Theorem. De Moivre was one of the great pioneers of classical probability theory. He also made seminal contributions in analytic geometry, complex analysis and the theory of annuities. The first biography of De Moivre, on which almost all subsequent ones have since relied, was written in French by Matthew Maty. It was published in 1755 in the Journal britannique. The authors provide here, for the first time, a complete translation into English of Maty's biography of De Moivre. New material, much of it taken from modern sources, is given in footnotes, along with numerous annotations designed to provide additional clarity to Maty's biography for contemporary readers.
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Deep Dive into Matys Biography of Abraham De Moivre, Translated, Annotated and Augmented.
November 27, 2004, marked the 250th anniversary of the death of Abraham De Moivre, best known in statistical circles for his famous large-sample approximation to the binomial distribution, whose generalization is now referred to as the Central Limit Theorem. De Moivre was one of the great pioneers of classical probability theory. He also made seminal contributions in analytic geometry, complex analysis and the theory of annuities. The first biography of De Moivre, on which almost all subsequent ones have since relied, was written in French by Matthew Maty. It was published in 1755 in the Journal britannique. The authors provide here, for the first time, a complete translation into English of Maty’s biography of De Moivre. New material, much of it taken from modern sources, is given in footnotes, along with numerous annotations designed to provide additional clarity to Maty’s biography for contemporary readers.
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Matthew Maty (1718Maty ( -1776) ) was born of Huguenot parentage in the city of Utrecht, in Holland. He studied medicine and philosophy at the University of Leiden before immigrating to England in 1740. After a decade in London, he edited for six years the Journal britannique, a French-language publication out of the Netherlands that was meant to promote British science and literature throughout continental Europe.
Some time after his arrival in London, Maty became acquainted with Abraham De Moivre. It is possible that their first encounter occurred at Slaughter’s Coffee-house, a favorite meeting place of French This is an electronic reprint of the original article published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in Statistical Science, 2007, Vol. 22, No. 1, 109-136. This reprint differs from the original in pagination and typographic detail. émigrés that both of them are known to have frequented. In the weeks prior to De Moivre’s death, Maty began to interview him in order to write his biography. De Moivre died shortly after giving his reminiscences up to the late 1680s and Maty completed the task using only his own knowledge of the man and De Moivre’s published work. The biography, written in French, appeared in the 1755 edition of the Journal britannique.
Surviving copies of Maty (1755) are available in only a few locations and are relatively difficult for many to access. 1 More readily available, via Gallica on the Internet, is Grandjean de Fouchy’s eulogy of De Moivre (Fouchy, 1754). Also written in French, it is based largely on the work of Maty (1755), as Fouchy acknowledges near the end of his text. In fact, his eulogy is for the most part a transcription of excerpts of Maty’s biography, with the latter’s scientific and personal biases replaced by his own 1 De Morgan ( 1846) was possibly the first to refer to Maty (1755) in print. Some 90 years after its publication, Maty’s biography of De Moivre was already regarded as obscure by De Morgan, who states: “I can hardly find any notice of this little tract of Dr. Maty.” A transcript of Maty (1755) is now available in PDF format on the second author’s webpage, at archimede.mat.ulaval.ca/pages/genest. in some places. In spite of appearances, the biography of Maty (1755) predates the eulogy of Fouchy (1754) considerably, since the 1754 volume of the Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences which carried Fouchy’s article was actually published in 1759.
Since De Moivre’s times, concise descriptions of his life and works have been published in several biographical dictionaries, the most recent being Schneider (2004). Maty’s article is the major source for almost all of them and remains, to this date, the best and most complete description of this great mathematician’s life (Schneider, 2001). On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of De Moivre’s death, therefore, it seems fitting to revisit Maty’s biography and to provide it in a language that is accessible to a large number of readers. Much additional source material is readily accessible today so that Maty’s biographical information has been substantially annotated and augmented. These complements appear in the form of numbered footnotes. Maty’s own lettered footnotes to his biography of De Moivre are given as endnotes to the article.
A thorough description and evaluation of De Moivre’s mathematical work may be found in Schneider (1968Schneider ( , 2005)). Hald (1990) also gives a detailed account of De Moivre’s work in probability. Consequently, attention is restricted here mostly to biographical rather than technical detail; the exceptions are when some mathematical commentary enhances Maty’s text.
By Matthew Maty I hereby pay tribute to the memory of Mr. De Moivre 2 on behalf of a Journal britannique and discharge the duty invested in me through his trust, by 2 Walker (1934) has given an extensive discussion of the spelling of De Moivre’s surname. French sources almost invariably refer to the name as Moivre, since the particle “de” would normally be associated with nobility. However, English sources, including De Moivre himself, use De Moivre, de Moivre and Demoivre. De Moivre is used here, since it is the form of his signature on most of his manuscript writings that the authors have been able to see. Schneider (2004) speculates that De Moivre added the particle “de” to his name on arrival in England in order to gain prestige in dealing with English clients, especially among the nobility. This seems doubtful. Among the nearly 1600 Huguenot refugees presenting themselves to the Savoy Church, a French Huguenot church in London, approximately 120 had “de” prefixing their surnames and publishing what I have been able to gather pertaining to his life and writings. Drawing upon materials that I have collected at pains to myself as well as discoveries that only experts in such matters are competent to appraise, I shall attempt to portray a mathematician who took pride in his own rectitude and who
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