Fermat was born in Beaumont-de Lomagne in the south of France.
1665 65438+1died in Caster on October 22nd. Fermat, the son of a leather dealer, was educated at home when he was a child.
Later I studied law and became a lawyer. Fermat reads a lot in his spare time and finishes his work modestly. He is proficient in several languages and natural sciences, and began to study mathematics seriously when he was nearly 30 years old.
Fermat prefers number theory. In this field, he has extraordinary intuition and ability. He proved many theorems and put forward many propositions, some of which became famous conjectures, which attracted future generations and promoted the development of number theory. For example, the most famous Fermat's Last Theorem: "There are no positive integers X, Y, Z, N, which makes Xn+Yn = Zn (n > 2)". Fermat's last theorem: "If P is prime and A and P are coprime, then ap- 1- 1 is divisible by P". There is also: "a prime number in the form of 4n+ 1 can be expressed as the sum of two squares". "Every nonnegative integer can be expressed as the sum of four or less squares" and so on. These propositions have been proved by later generations. The proof of propositions is encouraging, but what is even more surprising is that in the process of proving these propositions, many more meaningful mathematical achievements have been created. Fermat is called the founder of modern number theory, and some of Fermat's conjectures have been denied. For example, "For all nonnegative integers n, f(n)=22n+ 1 is a prime number." For n = 1, 2, 3, 4, the proposition holds, but Euler proved that f(5)=225+ 1 is a composite number. Even so, Fermat's achievements have not decreased at all, because the accumulation of mathematical knowledge depends not only on the proven theories, but also on those unknown conjectures, which is also an important source to promote the development of mathematics.
Fermat was a pioneer of calculus. Long before Newton and Leibniz, he put forward the method of finding the maximum and minimum step size with small molecules, and gave the method of finding the area surrounded by curves. Fermat is also an explorer of probability theory, and his correspondence with Pascal initiated the mathematical probability theory. Huygens' first formal paper on probability theory was based on the communication between Fermat and Pascal.
As an amateur mathematician, Fermat has made outstanding contributions to the development of mathematics and deserves to be called a master of mathematics.