Fermat, Pierre

Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) is one of the most famous number theoreticians in history, but mathematics was only his hobby. He was a judge in France, and he published very little during his life. He did correspond extensively with many leading intellectuals of his day, and his mathematical innovations were presented to these pen pals in his letters. 

Not long after the formulation of Snell s law, the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat unified the laws of reflection and refraction by showing that both could be deduced from the hypotheses that light travels a path of least time. In other words, given two points A and B in a region with mirrors or with different media, the path of a ray of light from point A to point B will be that for which the time of travel is least. The implication of Fermat s principle is that light travels at a finite speed. ... 

Pierre de Fermat, bom at end 1607 or at begin 1608 in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France, died Jan. 

French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes and French lawyer and mathematician Pierre de Fermat developed... 

Fermat principle The path taken by a ray of light between any two points in a system is always the path that takes the least time. This principle leads to the law of the rectilinear propagation of light and the laws of reflection and refraction. It was discovered by the French mathematician, Pierre de Fermat (1601-65). 

Calculus is usually considered to have come into being in the seventeenth century, but its roots were formed much earher. In the sixteenth century, Pierre de Fermat did work that was very closely related to calculus s differentiation (the taking of derivatives) and integration. In the seventeenth century, Rene Descartes founded analytic geometry, a key tool for developing calculus. 

Mahoney, Michael Sean. The Mathematical Career of Pierre de Fermat, 1601-1665. 2d rev. ed. Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1994. 

The mathematical foundation of the concept of risk, the theoiy of probability, is a result of joint efforts of two great minds of the time (1654), Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician and Pierre de Fermat a lawyer and mathematician. At about the same time, Antoine Arnauld, a theologian, was first to state that Fear of harm ought to be proportional not merely to the gravity of the harm, but also to the probability of the... 

Fermat De Pierre (1601—1665) Fr. math., devised principle of least time (action) and Fermat s small and big (last) theorems, gravity reciprocal attraction, father of modem theory of numbers, probabilities Feynman Richard Phillips (1918-1988) US. phys., quantum electrodynamics, devised Feynman diagrams as means for accounting possible particle transformations ( Theory of Fundamental Processes 1961)... 

Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) was a French lawyer and an amateur mathematician who is credited with founding the modem theory of numbers. 

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