Claude Gaspar Bachet de Méziriac

Claude Gaspar Bachet de Méziriac (1581 to 1638) was a French mathematician and poet born in Bourg-en-Bresse, then part of the Duchy of Savoy. Orphaned by the age of six, he was looked after by the Jesuit order, was briefly a member in 1601, and was a pupil of Jacques de Billy at the Jesuit college at Rheims. He wrote Problèmes plaisans et délectables qui se font par les nombres, issued in 1612 and enlarged in 1624, a collection of arithmetical tricks and questions, and Les Éléments arithmétiques, which exists in manuscript. His 1621 Latin translation of the Arithmetica of Diophantus is the one in whose margin Fermat wrote his note on Fermat's Last Theorem. He discovered means of solving indeterminate equations using continued fractions, a method of constructing magic squares and a proof of Bézout's identity. He married in 1620 and had seven children.