High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Doctrine of Chances was the first textbook on probability theory, written by 18th-century French mathematician Abraham de Moivre and first published in 1718. De Moivre wrote in English because he resided in England at the time, having fled France to escape the persecution of Huguenots. The book`s title came to be synonymous with probability theory, and accordingly the phrase was used in Thomas Bayes` famous posthumous paper An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances, wherein a version of Bayes` theorem was first introduced.