French mathematician who was one of the pioneers of Recreational Mathematics. His book on the subject, the first edition of which was issues in 1612, was the first of its kind. Bachet was a scholar as well as a popularizer, and his annotated translation of Diophantus' Arithmetica inspired Fermat's early work in number theory. In fact, it was in the margin of Fermat's copy of the Bachet restoration of the Arithmetica that Fermat made his famous remark about writing a power as a sum of two like powers, which came to be called Fermat's last theorem.

Fermat

Additional biographies: Dublin Trinity College