Pierre de Fermat Trivia Questions

Fermat's Little Theorem is a number theory result: if p is prime, then a^p ≡ a (mod p). It's elegant, not complex calculus, and he understood it well.

Fermat was a lawyer and a government official in Toulouse. Mathematics was his hobby, not his job—he never published formally under his name.

Prime numbers were studied by ancient Greeks like Euclid. Fermat did work on primes (like Fermat primes), but he didn't discover or name them.

This principle explains refraction and reflection, showing light 'chooses' the path of least time, not shortest distance—a key idea in physics.

He scribbled it in his copy of Arithmetica, stating he had a 'marvelous proof' but the margin was too small. It took Andrew Wiles 358 years to finally prove it.

Fermat and Pascal corresponded about a gambling problem (the 'problem of points'), which founded probability theory—but it wasn't a race or bet between them.

He invented this method to prove that no right triangle with integer sides can have an area equal to a perfect square, and later applied it to other problems.

Fermat developed his own method for finding tangents and maxima using coordinates before Descartes published La Géométrie, though Descartes got more credit.