Pierre de Fermat

Pierre de Fermat was a famous mathematician and lawyer. He was born in

Toulouse on the 17th August 1601 and died on the 12th January 1665.
His father was Dominique Fermat, a wealthy leather merchant, and his mother
was Claire de Long, mother of two boys (including Pierre) and two girls.
Pierre lived in France when it was a monarchy, he lived when Louis XIII and
Louis XIV were kings. Louis XIII cared about his country and its habitants.
Louis XIV reign’s is the longest one in history and he was very absolutist.
His professional degree was actually in law. He studied in the university of
Orleans in 1623, and he got the diploma in 1626. He always used to like
maths and he usually sent letters to his friends talking about them. He did it as
an amateur. Despite this, he began his first serious mathematical
investigations in 1629 in Burdeos, France. He had contact with many other
mathematicians, such as Jean de Beaugrand.
When he was a kid, he was always fond of mathematics and wanted to be a
lawyer.
He worked in a lot of projects like Fermat’s Spiral, friendly numbers, prime
numbers and other mathematical stuff, but the most important project he
worked in was his last theorem, where he said:
“It is impossible to find a way to convert a cube into the sum of two cubes, a
fourth power into the sum of two fourth powers, or in general any power
higher than the square into the sum of two powers of the same kind. I have
discovered an excellent demonstration. But this margin is too small for the
proof to fit in it.”
Mathematicians took more than 350 years to prove it. In 1994, Andrew Wiles
was able to figure it out by using methods that were discovered after Pierre’s
death. We’ll never know if Fermat actually knew how to prove it.