Google’s latest logo doodle celebrates the 410th anniversary of the birthday of French mathematician and lawyer Pierre de Fermat on August 17th with a chalkboard with mathematical equation, symbols, and an erased Google logo.

The California based company and search engine giant Google also nods playfully to the conditions of “Fermat’s Last Theorem,” (pictured on the Doodle’s chalkboard) — which the Frenchman so notably proposed about 1637 by scribbling in his copy of the ancient Greek text Arithmetica by Diophantus.

Google also embedded a hidden message in Fermat’s Doodle: “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this theorem, which this doodle is too small to contain.” Clicking the chalkboard image with initiate the search term “Pierre de Fermat.”

Fermat is an amateur mathematician who made contributions to analytic geometry, probability and optics, as well as his smallest ordinates discovery that is related to differential calculus.

Google Doodle today : Fermat and his Last Theorem

Fermat boasted by adding in Latin that he had no room to write his discovered proof for the theorem. Translation: “I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition that this margin is too narrow to contain.”

It would be more than 350 years — if our math is correct — until British mathematician Andrew Wiles, working alone in his attic for seven years, would find (in the mid-’90s) a proof for the world’s “most difficult math problem.”

Fermat is also recognized for his discovery of the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is comparable to another branch of mathematics, the differential calculus. Apparently, Calculus is divided into two parts, the integral and the differential.

Thank you for confusing our little heads and happy birthday to this most amazing of a mathematicians Pierre de Fermat.

 

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