He moved to England at a young age due to the religious persecution of Huguenots in France which reached a climax in 1685 with the Edict of Fontainebleau.

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.

Although mathematics was not part of his course work, de Moivre read several works on mathematics on his own, including Éléments des mathématiques by the French Oratorian priest and mathematician Jean Prestet and a short treatise on games of chance, De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae, by Christiaan Huygens the Dutch physicist, mathematician, astronomer and inventor.

In 1684, de Moivre moved to Paris to study physics, and for the first time had formal mathematics training with private lessons from Jacques Ozanam.

[1] To make a living, de Moivre became a private tutor of mathematics, visiting his pupils or teaching in the coffee houses of London.

However, as he was required to take extended walks around London to travel between his students, de Moivre had little time for study, so he tore pages from the book and carried them around in his pocket to read between lessons.

According to a possibly apocryphal story, Newton, in the later years of his life, used to refer people posing mathematical questions to him to de Moivre, saying, "He knows all these things better than I do.

In 1695, Halley communicated de Moivre's first mathematics paper, which arose from his study of fluxions in the Principia Mathematica, to the Royal Society.

Despite these successes, de Moivre was unable to obtain an appointment to a chair of mathematics at any university, which would have released him from his dependence on time-consuming tutoring that burdened him more than it did most other mathematicians of the time.

Arbuthnot, Hill, Halley, Jones, Machin, Burnet, Robarts, Bonet, Aston, and Taylor to review the claims of Newton and Leibniz as to who discovered calculus.

It is reported that he was a regular customer of old Slaughter's Coffee House, St. Martin's Lane at Cranbourn Street, where he earned a little money from playing chess.

[7] De Moivre pioneered the development of analytic geometry and the theory of probability by expanding upon the work of his predecessors, particularly Christiaan Huygens and several members of the Bernoulli family.

(The first book about games of chance, Liber de ludo aleae (On Casting the Die), was written by Girolamo Cardano in the 1560s, but it was not published until 1663.)

In the later editions of his book, de Moivre included his unpublished result of 1733, which is the first statement of an approximation to the binomial distribution in terms of what we now call the normal or Gaussian function.

[9] De Moivre also published an article called "Annuities upon Lives" in which he revealed the normal distribution of the mortality rate over a person's age.

Specifically, given a positive integer n, where n is even and large, then the coefficient of the middle term of (1 + 1)n is approximated by the equation:[21][22] On June 19, 1729, James Stirling sent to de Moivre a letter, which illustrated how he calculated the coefficient of the middle term of a binomial expansion (a + b)n for large values of n.[23][24] In 1730, Stirling published his book Methodus Differentialis [The Differential Method], in which he included his series for log(n!