Friday 17 August 2007

Pierre de Fermat

On August 17th 1601 Pierre de Fermat, lawyer and amateur (yet most notable) mathematician who needed wider margins, was born.

Fermat's Last Theorem states that
xn + yn = zn
has no non-zero integer solutions for x, y and z when n > 2. In his notebook Fermat wrote “I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.” It took three centuries for someone else to prove it.

On this day in 1961 the building of the Berlin Wall began and in 1962 the Beatles replaced Pete Best with Ringo Starr. And in 1987 the Nazi Rudolph Hess died, aged 93, after 46 years in Spandau Prison.

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