Preda Mihăilescu

Preda V. Mihăilescu (born 23 May 1955) is a Romanian mathematician, best known for his proof of the 158-year-old Catalan's conjecture.

Born in Bucharest,^[1] he is the brother of Vintilă Mihăilescu.

After leaving Romania in 1973, he settled in Switzerland.^[1] He studied mathematics and computer science in Zürich, receiving a PhD from ETH Zürich in 1997.^[2] His PhD thesis, titled Cyclotomy of rings and primality testing,^[3] was written under the direction of Erwin Engeler and Hendrik Lenstra.

For several years, he did research at the University of Paderborn, Germany. Since 2005, he has held a professorship at the University of Göttingen.

In 2002, Mihăilescu proved Catalan's conjecture.^[4][5][6] This number-theoretical conjecture, formulated by the French and Belgian mathematician Eugène Charles Catalan in 1844, had stood unresolved for 158 years. Mihăilescu's proof appeared in Crelle's Journal in 2004.

• P. J. Campbell (2002). "Science news 161". Mathematics Magazine. Vol. 75, no. 4.
• Ian Stewart (7 March 2013). The Great Mathematical Problems. Profile Books. p. 124. ISBN 978-1-84765-351-2.
• Bilu, Yuri F.; Bugeaud, Yann; Mignotte, Maurice (2014). The Problem of Catalan. Springer. OCLC 893117743.
• Metsänkylä, Tauno (2004). "Catalan's Conjecture: Another old Diophantine problem solved" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 41: 43–57. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-03-00993-5. MR 2015449.
• Mihăilescu, Preda (1997). Cyclotomy of rings and primality testing (Ph.D. thesis). ETH Zurich. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04.
• Mihăilescu, Preda (2004). "Primary Cyclotomic Units and a Proof of Catalan's Conjecture". Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik. 2004 (572): 167–195. doi:10.1515/crll.2004.048. MR 2076124.
• Mihăilescu, Preda (2005). Reflection, Bernoulli Numbers and the Proof of Catalan's Conjecture. European Congress of Mathematics. Stockholm, Sweden: European Mathematical Society. pp. 325–340. doi:10.4171/009-1/21. MR 2185753.
• Schoof, René (2008). Catalan's Conjecture. Universitext. Springer. OCLC 656399081.

• Preda Mihăilescu at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Web page at Göttingen
• Former Web page at Paderborn (no longer updated)
• Mihăilescu, Preda in libraries (WorldCat catalog)