On January 12, 1665, French lawyer and amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat, famous for his research in number theory, analytical geometry and probability theory, passed away. He is best known for Fermat's Last Theorem, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica.
On January 26, 1895, British mathematician Arthur Cayley passed away. He was the first to define the concept of a group in the modern way and helped to found the modern British school of pure mathematics.
Sage is a free, open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It combines the power of many existing open-source packages into a common, Python-based interface. The project goal is to create a viable free, open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.
On January 27, 1832, British mathematician, photographer, and children's book author Lewis Carroll, creator of the stories about 'Alice in Wonderland', was born.
On February 16, 1822, the cousin of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton was born. Galton the polymath, was known for his fundamental contributions to anthropology, geographics, genetics, psychology, statistics, and eugenics.