Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665)

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The mathematician Pierre de Fermat was born in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France, the son of a leather merchant. Like Pascal, he was educated at home. He worked for most of his life as a councillor for the local parliament in Toulouse, and led a fairly quiet life. He published very little during his lifetime, and much of his work was found after his death on loose sheets of paper or written in the margins of books he had read.

Fermat made important contributions to probability and number theory, and anticipated some results of differential calculus. He is most famous for a conjecture known as "Fermat's last theorem", which states that the equation a^{n +} bⁿ = cⁿ has no solutions where a, b and c are all integers for n>2. Fermat wrote in the margin of a book that he had "discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain". For over 350 years, mathematicians tried to recreate this proof, with no success. In 1994, Princeton University mathematician Andrew Wiles published a proof of Fermat's theorem, but this is almost certainly not the proof that Fermat was alluding to, as it is several hundred pages long!

To learn more about Fermat's work, see A Short Account of the History of Mathematics by W. W. Rouse Ball.

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