There is scarcely any one who states purely arithmetical questions, scarcely any who understands them. Is this not because arithmetic has been treated up to this time geometrically rather than arithmetically?

— Pierre de Fermat, Letter to Frénicle (1657)

Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=L6QKAAAAYAAJ

Quoted by Edward Everett Whitford in The Pell Equation (1912).

Topics: mathematics