Pierre de Fermat: Biography of a Great Thinker

most math subjects are relatively young while geometry and arithmetic have been studied for thousands of years other subjects such as calculus probability and analytic geometry were developed more recently if you could travel back in time to the beginning of the 17th century you would find the math collections and libraries to be considerably smaller this was all about to change and one of the people who helped change things was thought a mathematician Pierre de Fermat was born a little after 1600 in boomin de la mine in southern France he received his law degree from the University of Berlin and his professional resume was simple he served as a lawyer and Member of Parliament in Toulouse until his death and though he studied law his education was broad for example he knew multiple languages including Spanish Italian Latin and Greek for mahse knowledge of languages in mathematics was critical to one of his interests the restoration of ancient books one of his reconstructions was the ancient book playing low side by Apollonius but for ma did not stop there perhaps inspired by the work of a Polonius form I went on to discover analytic geometry Rene Descartes independently developed analytic geometry around the same time because the cart published his ideas he's frequently given credit for MA however only shared his ideas and letters to his friends but whether in a book or in a letter the idea of connecting geometry with equations was a leap forward for mathematics one of the people for maka responded with was a scholar Blaise Pascal once again in letters for ma helped develop another new branch of mathematics probability theory the catalyst for this was gambling Pascal had been asked to find the best strategy for a certain popular dice game and he shared the problem with her mom they exchanged letters shared ideas and together laid the foundation for the theory of probability Verma also solved several basic calculus problems he developed a way to find a maxima and minima of certain functions and was even able to compute the area under some basic curves at first this may not sound impressive these are elementary issues to students of calculus today remember this calculus did not exist during for miles lifetime but of all the branches of mathematics for my investigated he left his greatest mark on number theory the study of numbers pure and simple number theory is one of the oldest areas of mathematics for over two thousand years people have studied the basic properties of numbers but for mom is considered the father of modern number theory one problem frequently asked a number theory is given an equation find all integer solutions oddly enough the question of describing all real number solutions is relatively simple just graph the equation but when you restrict the types of numbers to integers the problem becomes much more complex these types of equations are called dyfan teen equations in honor of the ancient Greek mathematician Diophantus and are amongst the most difficult of math problems coincidentally it was while reading a book by diophantus that Vermont made an exciting discovery he claimed that the equation X to the n plus y to the N equals e to the N had no positive integer solutions if n was greater than 2 there infinitely many solutions when N equals 1 or n equals 2 but for N greater than 2 for ma was certain there was no positive solution he made a note in his book that he had found a truly marvelous proof but the margin was too narrow to write it down this problem became known as for Mars Last Theorem because of all his unproven statements this was the very last one to be proven true for over 300 years mathematicians worked on this problem before it was finally proven by Andrew Wiles in 1994 tremendous amounts of new mathematics were developed on the road to proving from Oz Last Theorem given how difficult the problem was many people wonder did forma really have a proof was he so clever as to see a solution which no one else could see we don't know if only the margin had been why

Channel: Socratica

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Keywords: Socratica, Pierre De Fermat (Lawyer), fermat, Fermat's Last Theorem (Mathematical Concept), diophantine equation, diophantine, number theory, probability, pascal, blaise pascal, descartes, andrew wiles, biography, math, maths, math video, fermat biography, biography of fermat

Id: Ij01HGgxnkA

Length: 4min 45sec (285 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 03 2013