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.

He rarely published, and most of his output was in the form of letters, mainly through his friend.

Nationality
French

History

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

Theorems and Definitions

 * Fermat's Little Theorem (otherwise known as Fermat's Theorem)
 * Fermat Prime - conjectured (incorrectly) that all integers of the form $2^{\left({2^n}\right)} + 1$ are prime.
 * Fermat's Two Squares Theorem (also known as Fermat's Christmas Theorem)
 * Fermat's Principle of Least Time


 * 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).


 * Fermat Point (also known as a Torricelli Point)

Books and Papers

 * c. 1629: Reconstructed what he could of On Plane Loci by
 * 1637: Introduction to Plane and Solid Loci
 * 1659: New Account of Discoveries in the Science of Numbers

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

 * [ Fermat ] invented analytic geometry in 1629 and described his ideas in a short work entitled Introduction to Plane and Solid Loci, 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.