Pierre de Fermat was a French mathematician born in 1601 in Beaumont de Lomagne, France. He worked as a lawyer but considered mathematics a hobby, making contributions anonymously through theorems he shared with others. His most famous conjecture, now known as Fermat's Last Theorem, stated that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2. It took over 300 years for Andrew Wiles to provide the first full proof of this theorem in 1993. Fermat made other contributions as one of the founders of analytic geometry and probability theory.