Abraham de Moivre
A Huguenot refugee who taught mathematics in London coffee houses for forty years, discovered the bell curve as a side effect of a harder problem, and predicted the day of his own death
Exiled from France as a Huguenot and never granted a university post in England, Abraham de Moivre supported himself as a private tutor while producing some of the era's most consequential mathematics: the normal approximation to the binomial distribution (an early form of the central limit theorem), de Moivre's formula linking complex numbers and trigonometry, and the mathematical foundations of life-annuity pricing. This bio covers his friendship with Newton, his role judging the Newton-Leibniz calculus dispute, and the famous story of him predicting his own death from an arithmetic progression in his sleep patterns.