Questions tagged [fermat]
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4 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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What physical problems required the invention of the derivative?
I know that Fermat had a method of adequality in order to solve certain optimization. One such problem was: "Suppose that you have a rectangle of material and need to cut corners into it such ...
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How did Fermat come up with his Last Theorem?
It's usually believed that Fermat's claim that he had a proof for the Last Theorem is false, and that it might have been more of a conjecture. Or considering it took many centuries and advanced ...
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How did Fermat find tangent lines of Folium of Descartes?
The wikipedia article about Folium of Descartes says:
Descartes challenged Pierre de Fermat to find the tangent line to the
curve at an arbitrary point since Fermat had recently discovered a
method ...
user14400
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17th or 18th century use of the continued fraction expansion of $(1 + \sqrt D)/2$ to solve the diophantine equation $x^2 - D y^2 = 4$
Can someone please provide an early reference to the use of the continued fraction expansion of $\frac{1+\sqrt D}2$ to solve the Diophantine equation $x^2 - D y^2 = 4$ for a positive integer $D$ ...
