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Fermat led a quiet life, kept very busy by his professional duties (from 1637, he was a councillor at the Parlement de Toulouse), and devoted his few leisure hours to mathematical research. By 1654, Fermat was recognized as a towering mathematician, although he had never published a paper or treatise. He anticipated Descartes's analytic geometry as well as the differential calculus of Leibniz and Newton; Newton explicitly acknowledged that the mathematician from Toulouse had inspired him. Fermat breathed new life into number theory and, together with Pascal, invented probability theory.
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