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Person

Pierre de Fermat

A portrait depicts a person dressed in historical attire, featuring a black coat adorned with gold embellishments and a white cravat, set against a dark background.

French magistrate and amateur mathematician (1607–1665) based in Toulouse, who corresponded with most of the leading mathematicians of his century without ever publishing a book. He developed methods for finding tangents and areas that anticipated the differential and integral calculus, founded probability theory in exchange with Pascal, and left behind the marginal note that became Fermat's Last Theorem. He arrived at Torricelli's horn independently around 1646.

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