Home Page    _ ________________ ____EDinformatics Home
Home Page
Today is
Great Minds --Great Thinkers

Pierre de Fermat

Pierre de Fermat

Pierre de Fermat (August 17, 1601 - January 12, 1665) was a French mathematician who is generally given minor credit for the development of modern calculus; in particular, for his work regarding tangents and stationary points. His work was such that he is sometimes regarded as the "father" of, both, differential calculus and number theory. He also made notable contributions to analytic geometry and probability.

Fermat was born near Montauban, France; he died at Castres.

Fermat worked on number theory while preparing an edition of Diophantus, and the notes and comments thereon contained the numerous theorems of considerable elegance necessary to develop the theory of numbers. Fermat is famous for his "Enigma" that was an extension of Pythagorean Theorem, also known as Fermat's Last Theorem. Together with René Descartes, Fermat was one of the two leading mathematicians of the first half of the 17th century. Independently of Descartes, he discovered the fundamental principle of analytic geometry. Through his correspondence with Blaise Pascal, he was a co-founder of the theory of probability.

See also:

External links


 

 

More Great Thinkers and Great Minds
Marie Curie
Pablo Picasso
Edwin Hubble
Jean Piaget
Robert Boyle
Plato
Rene Descartes
Miguel de Cervantes
Friedrich Nietzsche
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Gary Kasparov
Galileo Galilei
Dmitri Mendeleev
Archimedes
Albert Einstein
Isaac Newton
Leonhard Euler
Enrico Fermi
Joseph Louis Lagrange
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Bernhardt Riemann
Kurt Gödel
William Shakespeare
Betrand Russell
Charles Darwin
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Leo Tolstoy
Niels Bohr
Linus Pauling
Leonardo Da Vinci
Blaise Pascal
Michael Faraday
James Clerk Maxwell
Aristotle
Alan Turing
Sigmund Freud
Gottfried Leibniz
Max Planck
Aleksandr Pushkin
Ivan Pavlov
Pierre de Fermat

 

 


 

 

 



Questions or Comments?
Copyright © 1999 EdInformatics.com
All Rights Reserved.