The Doctrine of Chances
The Doctrine of Chances is a book on
probability theory by 18th-century French
mathematician Abraham de Moivre, published in
1733. De Moivre wrote in English because at that time he resided in England, having fled France to escape the persecution of Protestants. The book's title came to be synonymous with
probability theory, and accordinglly the phrase was used in
Thomas Bayes' famous posthumous paper
An Essay Toward Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, in which a version of
Bayes' theorem was first introduced.
In the second edition de Moivre's book introduced the concept of normal distributions as approximations to binomial distributions. In effect, de Moivre proved a weak version of the central limit theorem.