Pierre Raymond de Montmort (nonfiction)

Front cover of Montmort's Essay d'analyse sur les jeux de hazard, 1713.

Pierre Rémond de Montmort (27 October 1678 - 7 October 1719) was a French mathematician. His name was originally just Pierre Rémond or Raymond.

His father pressured him to study law, but he rebelled and travelled to England and Germany, returning to France in 1699 when, upon receiving a large inheritance from his father, he bought an estate and took the name de Montmort.

He was friendly with several other notable mathematicians, notably Nicholas Bernoulli, who collaborated with him while visiting his estate. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1715, while traveling again to England, and became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1716.

De Montmort is known for his book on probability and games of chance, Essay d'analyse sur les jeux de hazard, which was also the first to introduce the combinatorial study of derangements. He is also known for naming Pascal's triangle after Blaise Pascal, calling it "Table de M. Pascal pour les combinaisons."

Another of de Montmort's interests was the subject of finite differences; he developed a theorem which seems to have been independently rediscovered by Christian Goldbach in 1718.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Blaise Pascal (nonfiction)
• Christian Goldbach (nonfiction)
• Mathematician (nonfiction)
• Nicolaus I Bernoulli (nonfiction)

External links

• Pierre Raymond de Montmort @ Wikipedia