Post by Emmanuel Jesuyon Dansu (@ejdansu)

Inspiring Mathematicians 34: Pierre de Fermat

Pierre de Fermat (1607–1665) was a French lawyer and one of history's greatest self-taught mathematicians, whose groundbreaking work laid the foundations of modern number theory, probability, and analytic geometry.

Although mathematics was his passion rather than his profession, he made profound discoveries, including the principle of infinite descent, early methods for finding maxima and minima that anticipated calculus, and important collaborations with Blaise Pascal that gave birth to probability theory.

Fermat is best remembered for Fermat's Last Theorem, a claim he scribbled in the margin of a book, stating that the equation x^n+y^n=z^n has no positive integer solutions for n>2.

He famously wrote that he had a "truly marvelous proof" that the margin was too small to contain.

The theorem remained unsolved for over 350 years until it was finally proved by Andrew Wiles in 1994, cementing Fermat's enduring legacy as one of the most influential figures in the history of mathematics.

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