(parisotes) to refer to an approximate equality. Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac translated Diophantus's Greek word into Latin as adaequalitas. Paul Tannery's French translation of Fermat's Latin treatises on maxima and minima used the words adéquation and adégaler.

Formulation

Fermat used adequality first to find maxima of functions, and then adapted it to find tangent lines to curves.

To find the maximum of a

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