What is "little" in Fermat's little theorem?

360 Views Asked by At

Is there any logical reason or just introduced "little" in the name randomly.

Wikipedia says that it is called "little theorem" to distinguish it from Fermat's last theorem. Then why we just chose little and not any other term?

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On

I believe it's called Fermat's Little Theorem since Euler later proved the more general theorem using his "Totient" function which then covered all integer modulus, not just the prime modulus.