Pierre de Fermat was born in Beaumont-de-Lomagne in 1607, the son of a wealthy leather merchant. Trained as a lawyer, he served as a regional magistrate at Toulouse for most of his adult life — and produced his mathematics in evenings and Sundays, almost entirely by correspondence with Mersenne, Pascal and Roberval. He co-founded probability theory with Pascal, anticipated analytic geometry and calculus, and made deep contributions to number theory. His most famous note, scrawled in 1637 in the margin of his copy of Diophantus's Arithmetica, claimed a proof that no three positive integers a, b, c can satisfy a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer n > 2 — but that 'this margin is too narrow to contain it.' Fermat's Last Theorem stood as the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics until Andrew Wiles proved it in 1995.
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Mathematician · Lawyer · Amateur Number-Theorist
Pierre de Fermat
1,607 CE – 1,665 CE
The Toulouse magistrate who did mathematics as a hobby — and left in a book margin a 'truly marvellous proof' that mathematicians would not find for 358 years.
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