ABSTRACT
Pierre de Fermat was a seventeenth century amateur number theorist and was about thirty years old when a copy of Diophantus’ work fell into his hands. Fermat often went beyond the requested solutions if he saw an extension or a generalization which interested him. He would often scribble notes in the margin of his copy of Diophantus, and it is in this connection that we first meet the legendary ‘last theorem’. To prove the statement is evidently very difficult; so difficult that many mathematicians felt that Fermat must have been mistaken when he thought that he had found a proof. Although one could conceivably disprove Fermat’s last theorem with a single counter-example, and this might be achieved with a computer by simply testing all the numbers up to a certain limit, one can never prove that the theorem is true by this method.
