Transcript Pierre de Fermat

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August 17 1601
Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France
January 12 1665
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Fermat's pioneering work in analytic
geomety was circulated in manuscript form in
1636, predating the publication of Descartes'
famous La geometries.
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.
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Mathematics
Fermat was extremely preoccupied with
mathematics. He kept up 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.
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In number theory, Fermat's Last
Theorem (sometimes called Fermat's
conjecture, especially in older texts) states that
no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the
equation an + bn = cn for any integer value
of ngreater than two. The cases n = 1 and n = 2
were known to have infinitely many solutions.
This theorem was first conjectured by Pierre de
Fermat in 1637 in the margin of a copy
of Arithmetica where he claimed he had a
proof that was too large to fit in the margin.