Fermat & Mersenne

Fermat tickled by the Math goddess in the Capitol of Toulouse.

By training and by acquired right at the age of 23 he became a well-known legal magistrate in the court of appeals of Toulouse, a position he held until his death at the age of 57 (it is said he was still signing legal documents on his deathbed). Little he knew he will become one of the most celebrated Mathematicians of all time by the work he did as a pastime.

Through the brief correspondence he had with Pascal in 1654, the foundations of the modern Theory of Probability were laid. Among many other wonders, he is also credited with work that led to the formal establishment of infinitesimal calculus by Leibnitz and Newton, but his most popular achievement by far was his famous ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem’, an important Number Theory postulate that he wrote in a short note on the margins of his well-thumbed copy of Diophantus’s Arithmetica and that remained without a formal proof until 1994, when Andrew Wiles could finally solve the puzzle with the help of techniques unavailable to Fermat.

Father Marin Mersenne (photo from Wikipedia)

Like many of the mathematicians and scientists of his time, Fermat corresponded with father Marin Mersenne, a Minim monk who acted as a veritable virtual hub or ‘center of the universe’ for many of the enlightened intellects of the time, including people like Thomas Hobbes and Galileo, and through which Mathematics, Philosophy and the Physical sciences developed and thrived in the first half of the 17th century. Father Mersenne was himself a skilled mathematician, credited with some of the first discoveries in Prime Number Theory.

In 1997 the pair Matsumoto / Nishimura developed the famous ‘Mersenne Twister’, one of the most widely used pseudo random number generators, its name derived from the fact that its period length is chosen to be a power of two minus one prime number, also known as a Mersenne Prime.