# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/pierre-de-fermat
# Generated: 2026-08-31T15:48:37.570Z

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url: "https://fame.am/person/pierre-de-fermat"
name: "Pierre de Fermat"
slug: "pierre-de-fermat"
description: "A French lawyer who scribbled math problems in book margins for fun—and left one so tantalizing it took 358 years to solve. Fermat built the skeleton of calculus before Newton was born and seeded modern number theory, all while working a day job as a magistrate."
tagline: "French mathematician and lawyer"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Pierre_de_Fermat3.jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
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  isoCode: "FR"
category:
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profileType:
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birthDate: "1607"
deathDate: "1665-01-12"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Pierre de Fermat was born on 17 August 1601 and spent his professional life as a magistrate at the parlement of Toulouse, a poet and classicist who happened to be one of the sharpest mathematical minds in Europe. He developed a technique called adequality that anticipated differential calculus, discovering methods to find maximum and minimum points on curves decades before the field formally existed. His work spanned analytic geometry, probability, optics—where his principle for light propagation still bears his name—and especially number theory, where he made contributions that would define the discipline. In a margin note in his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica, he claimed to have proven a theorem about integer solutions to certain equations, adding that the margin was too small to contain his proof; that assertion became Fermat's Last Theorem, unproven until 1994. He died on 12 January 1665, having shared most of his discoveries through letters rather than formal publications, a hobbyist who quietly laid groundwork for centuries of mathematics.