Preda Mihăilescu

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

Born in Bucharest, he is the brother of Vintilă Mihăilescu. After leaving Romania in 1973, he settled in Switzerland. He studied mathematics and computer science in Zürich, receiving his Ph.D. from ETH Zürich in 1997. His thesis, titled Cyclotomy of rings and primality testing, 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 Georg-August University of Göttingen.

In 2002, Mihăilescu proved Catalan's conjecture. This number-theoretical conjecture, formulated by French mathematician Eugène Charles Catalan in 1844, had stood unresolved for over a century. Mihăilescu's proof appeared in Crelle's Journal in 2004. The result is now occasionally known as Mihăilescu's theorem.

In 2009, Mihăilescu announced a proof of Leopoldt's conjecture for all number fields.^[1]

References

• Tauno Metsänkylä, "Catalan's Conjecture: Another old Diophantine problem solved", Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 41 (2004), 43–57. MR 2015449
• Preda Mihăilescu, "Primary cyclotomic units and a proof of Catalan's conjecture", J. Reine Angew. Math. 572 (2004), 167–195. MR 2076124
• Preda Mihăilescu, "Reflection, Bernoulli numbers and the proof of Catalan's conjecture", European Congress of Mathematics, 325–340, Eur. Math. Soc., Zürich, 2005. MR 2185753
• René Schoof, "Catalan's Conjecture", Universitext, Springer-Verlag, 2008.

External links

• Preda Mihăilescu at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Web page at Göttingen
• Web page at Paderborn (no more updated)