Mathematician:Pierre de Fermat

Mathematician
French lawyer, also an amateur mathematician famous for lots of things. Especially:
 * Fermat's Little Theorem
 * Claimed to have found a proof for what became known as Fermat's Last Theorem, but it has since been doubted that this is in fact the case (he may have been mistaken).

Although he claimed to have found proofs of many theorems, few of these have survived. It has been suggested, with some justification, that it was Fermat, not, who was the true inventor of analytic geometry.

It has also been suggested that he shared the creation of the discipline of probability theory with.

He rarely published, and most of his output was in the form of letters, mainly through the correspondence he started with in $1636$.

Father of, who became his scientific executor.

Nationality
French

History

 * Born: 17 August 1601 or 1607/8 (exact date unknown), Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France
 * Died: 12 January 1665, Castres, France

Definitions

 * Fermat Pseudoprime
 * Fermat Number
 * Fermat's Equation
 * Fermat Prime
 * Fermat Quotient
 * Fermat Set
 * Fermat's Spiral
 * Fermat-Torricelli Point (with ), also known as either a Fermat Point or a Torricelli Point

Theorems and Conjectures

 * Fermat's Little Theorem (otherwise known as Fermat's Theorem)
 * Fermat's Right Triangle Theorem
 * Fermat's Two Squares Theorem (also known as Fermat's Christmas Theorem)
 * Fermat's Principle of Least Time
 * Fermat Prime Conjecture (false): that all integers of the form $2^{\paren {2^n} } + 1$ are prime
 * Fermat Problem (also known as Steiner's Problem for )


 * Claimed to have found a proof for what became known as Fermat's Last Theorem, but it has since been doubted that this is in fact the case (he may have been mistaken).

Publications

 * c. 1629: Reconstructed what he could of On Plane Loci by
 * 1637:
 * 1659: New Account of Discoveries in the Science of Numbers
 * 1670: Arithmetica (posthumous)
 * 1679: Isagoge ad locus planos et solidos ("On the Plane and Solid Locus") (posthumous)

Notable Quotes
''The equation $x^n + y^n = z^n$ has no integral solutions when $n > 2$. I have discovered a perfectly marvellous proof, but this margin is not big enough to hold it.''

Critical View

 * A master of masters.


 * le premier homme du monde (the foremost man of the world)


 * Look elsewhere for someone who can follow you in your researches about numbers. For my part, I confess that they are far beyond me, and I am competent only to admire them.
 * --, in a letter to Fermat


 * [ Fermat ] invented analytic geometry in 1629 and described his ideas in a short work entitled, which circulated in manuscript form from early 1637 on but was not published during his lifetime. ... nothing that we would recognize as analytic geometry can be found in ' essay, except perhaps the idea of using algebra as a language for discussing geometric problems. Fermat had the same idea, but did something important with it: He introduced perpendicular axes and found the general equations of straight lines and circles and the simplest equations of parabolas, ellipses, and hyperbolas ... it may be surmised that much of what [ ] knew he learned from Fermat.