ProofWiki:Mathematicians/Pierre de Fermat
From ProofWiki
French lawyer, also an amateur mathematician famous for lots of things. Especially:
- Fermat's Little Theorem
- Claimed to have found a proof for what became known as Fermat's Last Theorem, but it has since been doubted that this is in fact the case (he may have been mistaken).
Although he claimed to have found proofs of many theorems, few of these have survived.
It has been suggested, with some justification, that it was Fermat, not Descartes, who was the true inventor of analytic geometry.
Contents |
Nationality
French
History
- Born: 17 August 1601 or 1607/8 (exact date unknown), Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France
- Died: 12 January 1665, Castres, France
Theorems and Definitions
- Fermat's Little Theorem (otherwise known as Fermat's Theorem)
- Fermat Prime - conjectured (incorrectly) that all integers of the form $2^{\left({2^n}\right)} + 1$ are prime.
- Fermat's Christmas Theorem (also known as Fermat's Two Squares Theorem)
- Fermat's Principle
- Claimed to have found a proof for what became known as Fermat's Last Theorem, but it has since been doubted that this is in fact the case (he may have been mistaken).
- Fermat Point (also known as a Torricelli Point)
Books and Papers
- 1637: Introduction to Plane and Solid Loci
- 1659: New Account of Discoveries in the Science of Numbers
References
- ↑ George F. Simmons: Calculus Gems (1992):
"He invented analytic geometry in 1629 and described his ideas in a short work entitled Introduction to Plane and Solid Loci, which circulated in manuscript form from early 1637 on but was not published during his lifetime. ... nothing that we would recognize as analytic geometry can be found in Descartes' essay, except perhaps the idea of using algebra as a language for discussing geometric problems. Fermat had the same idea, but did something important with it: He introduced perpendicular axes and found the general equations of straight lines and circles and the simplest equations of parabolas, ellipses, and hyperbolas ...
Also see
- John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: "Pierre de Fermat": MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
- Eric Temple Bell: Men of Mathematics (1937): Chapter $\text{IV}$
- George F. Simmons: Differential Equations (1972): $\S 6$
- George F. Simmons: Calculus Gems (1992), Chapter $\text {A}.13$
