Abraham De Moivre; setting the stage for classical probability and its applications.
In chapter four Poitras draws heavily on his 2000 book (cited above) to provide an account of those individuals who contributed to the development of the methods that are now commonly used to price annuities, and in particular he analyses the writings of Jan de Witt, Edmond Hatley,
Abraham de Moivre and Thomas Simpson.
In fact, the formula (1.1) was discovered by the French mathematician
Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754) in the form
The Central Limit Theorem may be traced back to Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) and
Abraham De Moivre (1667-1754), though their motivations were quite different.