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-de-Lomagne.

• Fermat had a brother and two sisters.

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.

LIFE OF FERMAT

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

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

LIFE OF FERMAT

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION

PINAR KEÇECI