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Who provided the first known published proof of Fermat’s little theorem?
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Pierre de Fermat
Fermat, portrait by Roland Lefèvre; in the Narbonne City Museums, France
The first known published proof of Fermat’s little theorem was provided by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1736.1
While Pierre de Fermat first stated the theorem in 1640, no proof by him is known to exist. It is also worth noting that the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had developed a proof in an unpublished manuscript dating to approximately 1683, predating Euler's publication.1