CONTENTS
Life of Pierre de Fermat
• Beginning of Life
• School Life
• Work Life
• Death
LIFE OF PIERRE DE
FERMAT
LIFE OF FERMAT
LIFE:
• Fermat was born, most probably in November
1607, in Beaumont-de-Lomagne (present-day
Tarn-et-Garonne), France.
• Fermat's father was a wealthy merchant in
wheat and cattle and was three times for one
year one of the four consuls of Beaumont-deLomagne.
• Fermat had a brother and two sisters.
LIFE OF FERMAT
School life:
There is little evidence concerning his school
education.
• He went to College de Navarre in
Montauban.
• He attended the University of Orleans from
1623.
LIFE OF FERMAT
Work life:
lawyer and an amateur mathematician
• He received a bachelor in civil law in 1626.
• After moving to Bordeaux, he began his first
serious mathematical researches and in 1629 he
gave a copy of his restoration of Apollonius’s De
Locis Planis to one of the mathematicians there.
• In 1630 he bought the office of a councillor at the
Parlementde Toulouse.
LIFE OF FERMAT
Work life:
• Fermat's pioneering work in analytic geometry
was circulated in manuscript form in 1636.
(This manuscript was published posthumously in
1679 in "Varia opera mathematica", as Ad Locos
Planos et Solidos Isagoge, ("Introduction to Plane
and Solid Loci"))
LIFE OF FERMAT
Work life:
• Fermat developed a method for
determining maxima, minima, and tangents
to various curves that was equivalent to
differentiation. In these works, he obtained
a technique for finding the centers of
gravity of various plane and solid figures.
LIFE OF FERMAT
Work life:
• Fermat was the first person known to have
evaluated the integral of general power
functions. Using an ingenious trick, he was
able to reduce this evaluation to the sum of
geometric series.
(The resulting formula was helpful to Newton, and
then Leibniz, when they independently developed
the fundamental theorem of calculus.)
LIFE OF FERMAT
Work life:
• Fermat studied Pell’s equation, perfect
numbers, amicable numbers and what
would later become Fermat numbers when
he researched perfect numbers that he
discovered the little theorem.
LIFE OF FERMAT
Work life:
• He invented a factorization methot (Fermat’s factorization
method) as well as the proof technique of infinite descent,
which he used to prove Fermat's Last Theorem for the
case n = 4.
• Fermat developed the two square theorem, and the
polygonal number theorem-which states that each number
is a sum of three triangular numbes, four square numbers,
five pentagonal numbers, and so on• Moreover Fermat claimed to have proved all his arithmetic
theorems, few records of his proofs have survived.
LIFE OF FERMAT
Work life: Last Theorem
Holographic will handwritten
by Fermat on 4 March 1660 —
kept at the Departmental
Archives of Haute-Garonne, in
Toulouse.
Work life: Last Theorem
• 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. He had not bothered to
inform even Marin Mersenne of it. It
was not proved until 1994 by Sir
Andrew Wiles, using techniques
unavailable to Fermat.
LIFE OF FERMAT
LIFE OF FERMAT
Death:
• Pierre de Fermat caught the plague and died at
Castres, Tarn (12 January 1665).
LIFE OF FERMAT
Place of burial of Pierre de Fermat
in Place Jean Jaurés, Castres,
France. Translation of the plaque:
in this place was buried on
January 13, 1665, Pierre de
Fermat, councilor of the chamber
of Edit [Parlement of Toulouse]
and mathematician of great
renown, celebrated for his
theorem,
an + bn ≠ cn for n>2
THANK YOU FOR YOUR
ATTENTION
PINAR KEÇECI