UNIT 7 – MEDIA - Exercise 2

Read the following passage about Pierre de Fermat and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the option that best fits each of the numbered blanks
Pierre de Fermat was born on August 17 in 1601 in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, France. He was a famous French mathematician ___(1)___. Fermat was one of the two leading mathematicians of the first half of the 17th century (the other was René Descart). Fermat discovered the fundamental principle of analytic geometry. He was also regarded as ___(2)___.
What strikes as a surprise is that Fermat never considered doing research in Mathematics his job. Although Fermat studied law when he was at college, he developed strong love for foreign languages, literature and mathematics. He read a lot of documents and taught himself in many fields. As early as 1629 Fermat began ___(3)___.In 1631 Fermat received the degree in law from the University of Orléans. He served in the local parliament at Toulouse, becoming councillor in 1634. In 1638 he was named to the Criminal Court. Despite his busy work at the court, Fermat never stopped learning and doing mathematics. In 1679, he published Introduction to Loci in which he presented that the study of loci, or sets of points with certain characteristics, could be ___(4)___.
The most interesting story about Fermat should be his last theorem, which is also known as Fermat's great theorem. It is a statement that there are no natural numbers x, y, z such that x + y = z", in which n is ___(5)___. In 1636, Fermat, the distinguished mathematician, wrote in his copy of the Arithmetica that he had discovered a truly proof of this theorem, but the margin of the book was too small for him to write it down. For centuries, so many mathematicians all over the world were puzzled by this statement. No one could prove or disprove Fermat's last theorem. Not until 1993 could the English mathematician Andrew Wiles devise a proof of this theorem. He then presented the proof in the journal Annals of Mathematics in 1995. Andrew Wiles had been interested in Fermat's last theorem since the age of ten. His years of searching for an answer finally became successful.
(Adapted from Global friends)