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Franz Lemmermeyer
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Not only do we not know the date, we don't even know whether he wrote the remark at all. For all we know it might have been invented by his son Samuel, who published his father's comments.

In his letters, Fermat never mentioned the general case at all, but quite often posed the problem of solving the cases $n=3$ and $n=4$. I am almost certain that Fermat discovered infinite descent around 1640, which means that in 1637 he did not have any chance of proving FLT for exponent 4 (let alone in general).

In 1637, Fermat also stated the polygonal number theorem and claimed to have a proof; this is just about as unlikely as in the case of FLT -- I guess Fermat wasn't really careful in these early days.

Let me also mention that Fermat posed FLT for $n=3$ always as a problem or as a question, and did not claim unambiguously to have a proof; my interpretation is that he did not have a proof for $n = 3$, and that he knew he did not have one.

Franz Lemmermeyer
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