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 informatics 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 Hend... more

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 informatics 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 is a professor at the Georg-August University of Göttingen. French mathematician Eugène Charles Catalan formulated his celebrated conjecture in 1844. The proof of the conjecture, given by Mihăilescu in 2002, appeared in Crelle's Journal in 2004. The result is now known as Mihăilescu's theorem. less