Pierre de Fermat

Pierre de Fermat (French: [pjɛːʁ dəfɛʁma]; 17 August 1601 – 12 January 1665) was a French lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse, France, and a mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of the differential calculus, then unknown, and his research into number theory. He made notable contributions to analytic geometry, probability, and optics. He is best known for Fermat's Last Theorem, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica.

Life and work

Fermat was born in the first decade of the 17th century in Beaumont-de-Lomagne (present-day Tarn-et-Garonne), France; the late 15th-century mansion where Fermat was born is now a museum. He was from Gascony, where his father, Dominique Fermat, was a wealthy leather merchant, and served three one-year terms as one of the four consuls of Beaumont-de-Lomagne. His mother was either Françoise Cazeneuve or Claire de Long. Pierre had one brother and two sisters and was almost certainly brought up in the town of his birth. There is little evidence concerning his school education, but it was probably at the Collège de Navarre in Montauban.