Pierre de Fermat

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 t…