Editing The Doctrine of Chances (section)

==Editions==
The full title of the first edition was ''The Doctrine of Chances: or, A Method of Calculating the Probability of Events in Play''. It was published in 1718, by W. Pearson, and ran for 175 pages.
Published in 1738 by Woodfall and running for 258 pages, the second edition of de Moivre's book introduced the concept of [[normal distribution]]s as approximations to [[binomial distribution]]s. In effect de Moivre proved a special case of the [[central limit theorem]].  Sometimes his result is called the [[theorem of de Moivre–Laplace]].
A third edition was published posthumously in 1756 by A. Millar, and ran for 348 pages; additional material in this edition included an application of probability theory to [[actuarial science]] in the calculation of [[Annuity (finance theory)|annuities]].<ref name="schneider"/>