Abraham de Moivre

Abraham de Moivre was born in France on 26 May 1667, but the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685 drove Huguenots into exile, and he landed in England young, poor, and outside the university system. He became friends with Newton, Halley, and Stirling, making his living as a tutor while working the problems others wouldn't touch. He discovered what's now called Binet's formula for Fibonacci numbers, linking the golden ratio to the sequence's nth term, and was the first to postulate the central limit theorem - proving a special case of the idea that now anchors probability theory. His book "The Doctrine of Chances" became a manual for gamblers and a text for mathematicians. He died in London on 27 November 1754, having spent a life building bridges between chance and certainty from the margins.