[Mathematics - Autograph manuscript].

Bookseller Notes

A scarce example of a manuscript from the renowned mathematician, Abraham de Moivre (1667-1754), who is probably most famous for his formula, linking complex numbers and trigonometry, but whose works on probability theory, notably The Doctrine of Chances, 1718, and his exploration of the Fibonacci series and the golden ratio, were fundamental to the field. Although he was admired and befriended by the great scientists of the age - Newton, Halley and Stirling - and become a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1697, he was never granted an academic post, despite the intervention on one occasion of Leibniz himself. De Moivre made his living from teaching mathematics as a private tutor, visiting pupils (reading torn-out pages of Principia Mathematica, it was said, as he walked the significant distances across London between visits) or tutoring at his regular haunt, Old Slaughter's Coffee House, where he also gambled at chess (Bellhouse, D.R. Abraham de Moivre..., 2011).This manuscript, far from the theoretical heights of his lasting fame, is a touching example of his day-to-day existence: five simple lessons to a pupil on geometry: dividing a line into equal parts; finding a proportion; making an angle; finding a tangent; and dividing a circle into equal parts. The manuscript is unsigned but the characteristic handwriting closely resembles EL/M3/52 in the collection of The Royal Society.