Mathematics
- The 16-year old Blaise Pascal demonstrates the properties of the hexagrammum mysticum in his Essai pour les coniques which he sends to Mersenne.
- October 18 - Fermat states his "little theorem" in a letter to Frénicle de Bessy: if p is a prime number, then for any integer a, a p − a will be evenly divisible by p.
- December 25 - Fermat claims a proof of the theorem on sums of two squares in a letter to Mersenne ("Fermat's Christmas Theorem"): an odd prime p is expressible as the sum of two squares.
Read more about this topic: 1640 In Science
Famous quotes containing the word mathematics:
“The three main medieval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)