Fermat

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. A seventeenth-century French lawyer and mathematician known for foundational work in number theory and calculus
2. The French mathematician who lived in the 1600s and proposed the famous last theorem about powers of integers
3. Pierre de Fermat, a French jurist and mathematician whose ideas helped lay the groundwork for modern number theory

Etymology: Fermat is a surname, and the word we need is the one attached to Pierre de Fermat, the 17th-century French lawyer and amateur mathematician. He was a magistrate in Toulouse who worked on mathematics in his spare time, and he rarely published his results. Instead he scribbled claims in margins and sent them in letters, most famously a note in his copy of Diophantus' "Arithmetica" claiming a proof that no three positive integers satisfy an equation of the form a^n + b^n = c^n for any whole number n greater than 2. His son later published his annotated copy, and the claim became known as Fermat's Last Theorem. The name survives in the word "Fermat's" as a label for that problem, which went unproven for more than three centuries until Andrew Wiles published a proof in the 1990s. The proof was not found by any of Fermat's contemporaries, so Fermat's marginal remark stands as one of the most famous unverified claims in mathematical history.