Pierre de Fermat
c. 1607 – 12 January 1665
Pierre de Fermat (c. 1607-1665) was a French lawyer and mathematician who made his living as a magistrate at the Parlement of Toulouse while producing groundbreaking mathematics in his spare time. He is credited with early developments leading to calculus, co-founded probability theory with Blaise Pascal, and made deep contributions to number theory, most famously the conjecture known as Fermat's Last Theorem, which remained unproven until 1994.
Lived at the same time
Well-documented people whose lives overlapped with Pierre de Fermat.
- Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) Overlapped 58 years →
- Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) Overlapped 58 years →
- Otto von Guericke (1602–1686) Overlapped 58 years →
- Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) Overlapped 58 years →
- Shah Jahan (1592–1666) Overlapped 58 years →
- Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) Overlapped 58 years →
Life events
Pierre de Fermat was born in Beaumont-de-Lomagne in Gascony, the son of a wealthy leather merchant; the exact year of his birth, traditionally given as 1601, is now generally placed around 1607.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgFermat completed his legal studies at Orleans, qualifying for a career as a lawyer and magistrate.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgFermat became a councillor at the high court in Toulouse, an office that entitled him to the noble particle 'de', and held judicial posts there for the rest of his life.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgFermat married Louise de Long, a cousin of his mother; the couple had several children.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgIn his manuscript Methodus ad disquirendam maximam et minimam, circulated in the 1630s, Fermat devised techniques for finding extrema and tangents that foreshadowed differential calculus.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgIn the margin of his copy of Diophantus's Arithmetica, Fermat claimed a proof that no three positive integers satisfy a^n + b^n = c^n for n greater than 2, a claim not proven until Andrew Wiles's work in 1994.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgFermat and Pascal exchanged letters on the problem of points, laying the foundations of the mathematical theory of probability.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgFermat derived the law of refraction from his principle that light travels between two points along the path of least time.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgFermat died in Castres, where he had been serving in the chamber of the Edict of the Parlement of Toulouse, three days after signing his last legal document.
Source: en.wikipedia.org