Mathematics · 1670
Observatio Domini Petri de Fermat
Excerpt · Diophantus, Arithmetica, Book II, Question VIII · Toulouse, 1670
Fermat’s note that no cube or higher power splits into two like powers, with the question of Diophantus it annotates.
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- A3
- License
- Public domain
- Source
- archive.org
- Retrieved
- 27 September 2026
- Language
- Latin
- Rights holder
- Pierre de Fermat; Claude-Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac; Samuel de Fermat, 1670
Theme
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Edition
Excerpt of page 61 of Diophanti Alexandrini Arithmeticorum libri sex, et De numeris multangulis liber vnus, cum commentariis C. G. Bacheti V. C. et obseruationibus D. P. de Fermat senatoris Tolosani (Tolosae, Bernard Bosc, 1670), edited by Samuel de Fermat. Kept: the Latin of Quæstio VIII of Book II (Bachet’s translation) and the Observatio Domini Petri de Fermat printed under it, both complete; left out: the Greek text of the question, which faces the Latin, and the rest of the page. The text comes from the OCR of the Internet Archive item bub_gb_yx9VIgeaCEYC (copy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, digitized by Google), in which nearly every line is garbled: each line was corrected on the scan of that page and of a second copy (bub_gb__iGRuJyOtNUC, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze), whose OCR of the observation agrees. The four fractions, printed in small type, were read on both scans and are consistent (16/5 and its square 256/25; 144/25; 400/25). Normalizations: the long s is set as a round s and the ct ligature as two letters; u and v, æ and the accents (à, verò) are kept as printed; the drop caps are set as capitals (“Propositvm”, its rest in small capitals as printed, and “Cvbum”, printed with a capital V after the drop cap); the minus sign, printed as a dash, is set as a minus sign; words hyphenated at line ends are rejoined. The page image is the Florence copy, cropped, turned to greyscale and its paper whitened.
Rights
Pierre de Fermat died on 12 January 1665 (Wikidata Q75655), Claude-Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac, the translator of the Latin, on 26 February 1638 (Wikidata Q371882), and Samuel de Fermat, the editor, in 1690 (Wikidata Q61475764); the book was published in 1670. It is in the public domain in France, where the authors died before 1 January 1956, and in the United States, where it was published before 1 January 1931. The Internet Archive marks both scans with the Public Domain Mark 1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/).
