Mathematical Mysteries in Byzantium

Abstract

This chapter examines how the mathematical mysteries of Diophantus were preserved, embellished, developed, and enjoyed in Byzantium by many generations of amateur mathematicians like Pierre de Fermat, who formulated what became known as Fermat's last theorem. Fermat was a seventeenth-century scholar and an amateur mathematician who developed several original concepts in addition to the famous “last theorem.” One of his sources was the Arithmetika, a collection of number problems written by Diophantus, a mathematician who appears to have flurished in Alexandria in the third century AD. It was through the Greek text translated into Latin that Fermat became familiar with Diophantus's mathematical problems, and in particular the one at book II, 8, which encouraged the formulation of his own last theorem. Fermat's last theorem claims that “the equation xn + yn = zn has no nontrivial solutions when n is greater than 2”.