Wednesday 28 September 2011

Amnesia, Maths and book-defacing


Mathematician Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) was also born in Toulouse, but unlike Count Odo of Toulouse (886-918)  Fermat wasn't absent-minded, he just ran out of space. He scribbled in the margin of a book "I've found the answer to this seriously-difficult maths problem ("Fermat's Last Theorem"), but there isn't room in this margin to tell you what it is." Of course, if he hadn't written all that stuff in the margin, there might have been room to tell us what the answer was. And in any case, scribbling in printed books is hardly a thing to be encouraged. Let's hope Toulouse Library fined him for defacing public property.



La Résidence - THE French Property People

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