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What did Pierre de Fermat write in the margin of his copy of Diophantus’s Arithmetica?
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Pierre de Fermat
Fermat, portrait by Roland Lefèvre; in the Narbonne City Museums, France
In 1637, while reading his copy of Diophantus’s Arithmetica, the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat wrote a note in the margin regarding what is now known as Fermat’s last theorem.
He stated: "It is impossible for a cube to be a sum of two cubes, a fourth power to be a sum of two fourth powers, or in general for any number that is a power greater than the second to be the sum of two like powers. I have discovered a truly remarkable proof [of this theorem], but this margin is too small to contain it."12