Pierre de Fermat (1607-1665)
Fermat was born at Beaumont-de-Lomagne,France. Pierre Fermat's father was a wealthy leather merchant and second consul of Beaumont-de-Lomagne. Pierre had a brother and two sisters.
He received a degree in civil law, in 1631, receiving the title of councillor at the High Court of Judicature in Toulouse, which he held for the rest of his life. Due to the office he now held he became entitled to change his name from Pierre Fermat to Pierre de Fermat. Fluent in Latin, Greek, Italian, and Spanish, Fermat was praised for his written verse in several languages, and his advice was eagerly sought regarding the emendation of Greek texts.
He communicated most of his work in letters to friends, often with little or no proof of his theorems. This allowed him to preserve his status as an "amateur" while gaining the recognition he desired.
In number theory, Fermat studied Pell's equation,Fermat numbers,perfect number, and amicable numbers. It was while researching perfect numbers that he discovered the little theorem.He also invented a factorization method which has been named for him as well as the proof technique of infinite descent,which he used to prove Fermat's Last Theorem for the case n = 4.
Although Fermat claimed to have proved all his arithmetic theorems, few records of his proofs have survived. Many mathematicians, including Gauss, doubted several of his claims, especially given the difficulty of some of the problems and the limited mathematical tools available to Fermat. His famous Last Theorem was first discovered by his son in the margin on his father's copy of an edition of Diophantus, and included the statement that the margin was too small to include the proof. It was not proved until 1994, using techniques unavailable to Fermat.
He died at Castres,age 63, 79 kilometers east of Toulouse.
