Pierre de Fermat was a French lawyer and government official most remembered for his work in number theory; in particular for Fermat's Last Theorem. He is also important in the foundations of the calculus.
Pierre de Fermat
Pierre de Fermat
Born August 17, 1601(1601-08-17)
Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France
Died January 12, 1665(1665-01-12) (aged 63)
Castres, France
Residence France
Nationality French
Fields Mathematics and Law
Known for Number theory
Analytic geometry
Fermat's principle
Probability
Fermat's Last Theorem
Influences François Viète
Pierre De Fermat's Last Theorem on His 410th Birth Anniversary Doodle
Toulouse, France, and an amateur mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his 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 then unknown differential calculus, 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.
Pierre Fermat's father was a wealthy leather merchant and second consul of Beaumont- de- Lomagne. There is some dispute about the date of Pierre's birth as given above, since it is possible that he had an elder brother (who had also been given the name Pierre) but who died young. Pierre had a brother and two sisters and was almost certainly brought up in the town of his birth. Although there is little evidence concerning his school education it must have been at the local Franciscan monastery.
He attended the University of Toulouse before moving to Bordeaux in the second half of the 1620s. In Bordeaux he began his first serious mathematical researches and in 1629 he gave a copy of his restoration of Apollonius's Plane loci to one of the mathematicians there. Certainly in Bordeaux he was in contact with Beaugrand and during this time he produced important work on maxima and minima which he gave to Étienne d'Espagnet who clearly shared mathematical interests with Fermat.
From Bordeaux Fermat went to Orléans where he studied law at the University. He received a degree in civil law and he purchased the offices of councillor at the parliament in Toulouse. So by 1631 Fermat was a lawyer and government official in Toulouse and because of the office he now held he became entitled to change his name from Pierre Fermat to Pierre de Fermat.
For the remainder of his life he lived in Toulouse but as well as working there he also worked in his home town of Beaumont-de-Lomagne and a nearby town of Castres. From his appointment on 14 May 1631 Fermat worked in the lower chamber of the parliament but on 16 January 1638 he was appointed to a higher chamber, then in 1652 he was promoted to the highest level at the criminal court. Still further promotions seem to indicate a fairly meteoric rise through the profession but promotion was done mostly on seniority and the plague struck the region in the early 1650s meaning that many of the older men died. Fermat himself was struck down by the plague and in 1653 his death was wrongly reported, then corrected:-
I informed you earlier of the death of Fermat. He is alive, and we no longer fear for his health, even though we had counted him among the dead a short time ago.
The following report, made to Colbert the leading figure in France at the time, has a ring of truth:-
Fermat, a man of great erudition, has contact with men of learning everywhere. But he is rather preoccupied, he does not report cases well and is confused.
Of course Fermat was preoccupied with mathematics. He kept his mathematical friendship with Beaugrand after he moved to Toulouse but there he gained a new mathematical friend in Carcavi. Fermat met Carcavi in a professional capacity since both were councillors in Toulouse but they both shared a love of mathematics and Fermat told Carcavi about his mathematical discoveries.
The period from 1643 to 1654 was one when Fermat was out of touch with his scientific colleagues in Paris. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly pressure of work kept him from devoting so much time to mathematics. Secondly the Fronde, a civil war in France, took place and from 1648 Toulouse was greatly affected. Finally there was the plague of 1651 which must have had great consequences both on life in Toulouse and of course its near fatal consequences on Fermat himself. However it was during this time that Fermat worked on number theory.
Fermat is best remembered for this work in number theory, in particular for Fermat's Last Theorem. This theorem states that
xn + yn = zn
has no non-zero integer solutions for x, y and z when n > 2. Fermat wrote, in the margin of Bachet's translation of Diophantus's Arithmetica
His problems did not prompt too much interest as most mathematicians seemed to think that number theory was not an important topic. The second of the two problems, namely to find all solutions of Nx2 + 1 = y2 for N not a square, was however solved by Wallis and Brouncker and they developed continued fractions in their solution. Brouncker produced rational solutions which led to arguments. Frenicle de Bessy was perhaps the only mathematician at that time who was really interested in number theory but he did not have sufficient mathematical talents to allow him to make a significant contribution.
Fermat posed further problems, namely that the sum of two cubes cannot be a cube (a special case of Fermat's Last Theorem which may indicate that by this time Fermat realised that his proof of the general result was incorrect), that there are exactly two integer solutions of x2 + 4 = y3 and that the equation x2 + 2 = y3 has only one integer solution. He posed problems directly to the English. Everyone failed to see that Fermat had been hoping his specific problems would lead them to discover, as he had done, deeper theoretical results.
Famous Quote:
"I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too small to contain.""
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