November 27, 2004, marked the 250th anniversary of the death of Abraham De Moivre, whose famous approximation to the binomial distribution inspired the Central Limit Theorem. De Moivre, a French Huguenot refugee living in England, was one of the great pioneers of classical probability theory. He also made seminal contributions in analytic geometry, complex analysis and the theory of annuities. A summary of his life and works will be presented within the social and scientific context of the time.

This talk is based on joint work with David R. Bellhouse of the University of Western Ontario.