The Doctrine of Chances

The Doctrine of Chances is a book on the theory of probability of the eighteenth century written by the French mathematician Abraham de Moivre, published in 1718. De Moivre wrote this book in English because he was living in England at the time, having fled France because of the persecution of the Huguenots. The title of the book has become synonymous with probability theory and therefore the phrase was used in Thomas Bayes' famous postulate "An Essay Toward Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances" (An Essay to Solve a Problem in the Doctrine of Probabilities), where Bayes' theorem was first introduced.

The second edition published in 1738 introduced the concept of normal distribution as an approximation of the binomial distribution. In fact Moivre proved a special case of the central limit theorem. Sometimes its result is called the De Moivre-Laplace Theorem. A third edition was published in 1756.

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