Birthday of Pierre de Fermat (17th August 1601)

Pierre de Fermat, most famous for having produced ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’, was born near Montauban in 1601 and died at Castres in January 1665. He was the son of a leather-merchant and was educated at home. Fermat initially studied law at Orléans University, only pursuing Mathematics as a hobby in his free time.

Although he is today recognised as a very powerful mathematician, during his lifetime, Fermat was more widely-acclaimed for his linguistical genius: being fluent in Latin, Basque, classical Greek, Italian and Spanish, his advice was eagerly sought regarding the emendation of Greek texts. It was his skills in languages, diplomacy and law that saw him elected Councillor at the High Court of Judicature in Toulouse in 1631, a position he held for the rest of his life.

Fermat published nothing officially during his lifetime, but his genius was discovered in notes he had written in the margins of other famous works and through various letters to friends. It was through such communications that he entered into a number of disputes with fellow contemporaries such as Descartes and Wallis. Fermat’s Last Theorem is a perfect example of this – he only described it in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica. Fermat came up with a number of elegant and advanced theorems, particularly in the theory of numbers, however many were based purely on his own intuition and inherent genius, and have therefore still not been rigorously proved.

Fermat first conjectured his ‘Last Theorem’ in 1637, and claimed that the proof was too large to fit in the margin. As a result no successful proof was available until long after his death, in 1995, when the mathematician Andrew Wiles (building on the previous work of a number of other leading mathematicians) succeeded in proving enough of the modularity conjecture to comprehensively prove the theorem.

As well as his famous ‘Last Theorem’, Fermat is also credited as having, through a correspondence with Blaise Pascal in 1654, laid the fundamental groundwork for the theory of probability. Fermat himself carried out the first ever rigorous probability calculation, after having been approached by a professional gambler who asked him why if he bet on rolling at least one six in four throws of the dice he won in the long term, whereas betting on throwing at least one double-six in 24 throws of the dice resulted in him losing; Fermat proved why this was the case mathematically.

To find out more about probability why not have a look at the ‘Unit 6: Probability’ resource from the Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching which you can find in the eLibrary.