Fermat was one of the greatest amateur mathematicians. He was born on August 20, 1601 in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France, to a prosperous merchant family. Pierre's financially secure family situation and his mother's high parliamentary social status made the study of law a logical choice for Fermat. He received the degree of Bachelor of Civil Laws from the University of Orléans in 1631, and from that time he rose steadily through the provincial government hierarchy to attain the high position of King's Counsellor in 1648, a position he held for 17 years.

Fermat's interest in mathematics, always as a hobby and not a profession, blossomed during a stay in Bordeaux, France, toward the end of the 1620s, where he studied the works of François Viète. Fermat assimilated the new symbolic algebra and theory of equations that was the basis of Viète's work. Fermat viewed his own contributions...