4 puzzles from Pierre de Fermat, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.
Around 1637, Pierre de Fermat wrote in the margin of a book that no three positive whole numbers a, b and c can satisfy a^n + b^n = c^n for any whole number n greater than 2 — and …
— Pierre de Fermat; proved by Andrew Wiles, Fermat's Last Theorem
Pierre de Fermat challenged Evangelista Torricelli with a deceptively simple question: inside any triangle, find the single point that minimizes the total distance to all three cor…
— Pierre de Fermat (posed); Evangelista Torricelli (solved), Fermat point
Two people wager equal stakes on a fair coin-flip game, first to 6 points wins the whole pot. They're forced to quit early, with the score at 5 to 3. Splitting the pot 5:3 (by poin…
— Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, Correspondence of 1654 (on the Problem of Points, first posed in Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, 1494)
Pierre de Fermat claimed dozens of theorems in the margins of his books without ever writing down a proof, leaving mathematicians centuries of homework. But for one claim -- that n…
— Pierre de Fermat, Observations on Diophantus