|
Pierre de Fermat (; 17 August 1601 – 12 January 1665) was a French lawyer at the ''Parlement'' of Toulouse, France, and a mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his technique of adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of the differential calculus, then unknown, and his research into number theory. He made notable contributions to analytic geometry, probability, and optics. He is best known for Fermat's Last Theorem, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' ''Arithmetica''. ==Life and work== Fermat was born in the first decade of the 17th century in Beaumont-de-Lomagne (present-day Tarn-et-Garonne), France; the late 15th-century mansion where Fermat was born is now a museum. He was from Gascony, where his father, Dominique Fermat, was a wealthy leather merchant, and served three one-year terms as one of the four consuls of Beaumont-de-Lomagne. His mother was either Françoise Cazeneuve or Claire de Long. Pierre had one brother and two sisters and was almost certainly brought up in the town of his birth. There is little evidence concerning his school education, but it was probably at the Collège de Navarre in Montauban. He attended the University of Orléans from 1623 and received a bachelor in civil law in 1626, before moving to Bordeaux. In Bordeaux he began his first serious mathematical researches and in 1629 he gave a copy of his restoration of Apollonius's ''De Locis Planis'' to one of the mathematicians there. Certainly in Bordeaux he was in contact with Beaugrand and during this time he produced important work on maxima and minima which he gave to Étienne d'Espagnet who clearly shared mathematical interests with Fermat. There he became much influenced by the work of François Viète. In 1630 he bought the office of a councillor at the Parlement de Toulouse, one of the High Courts of Judicature in France, and was sworn in by the Grand Chambre in May 1631. He held this office for the rest of his life. Fermat thereby became entitled to change his name from Pierre Fermat to Pierre de Fermat. Fluent in six languages: French, Latin, Occitan, classical Greek, Italian, and Spanish, Fermat was praised for his written verse in several languages, and his advice was eagerly sought regarding the emendation of Greek texts. He communicated most of his work in letters to friends, often with little or no proof of his theorems. Secrecy was common in European mathematical circles at the time. This naturally led to priority disputes with contemporaries such as Descartes and Wallis. Anders Hald writes that, "The basis of Fermat's mathematics was the classical Greek treatises combined with Vieta's new algebraic methods."〔http://www.ams.org/notices/199507/faltings.pdf〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Pierre de Fermat」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|