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Article: Birth of Pierre de Fermat.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- History Today
- Article date:
- August 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 History Today Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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August 17th, 1601
FERMAT WROTE HIS LAST Theorem, the Holy Grail of higher mathematics, in the margin of his copy of a text by a Greek mathematician of the third century AD, Diophantus, next to a discussion about splitting a squared number into two squares. `It is impossible,' he wrote, `for a cube to be written as the sum of two cubes or a fourth power to be written as the sum of two fourth powers or, in general, for any number which is a power greater than the second to be written as the sum of two like powers.' Annoyingly and characteristically, he added that he had discovered `a wonderful proof' of this proposition, but the margin was not big enough for him ...