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Preda V. Mihăilescu (b. May 23, 1955) is a Romanian-born German 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.

References

* Tauno Metsänkylä, "Catalan's Conjecture: Another old Diophantine problem solved", Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 41 (2004), 43–57. MR2015449

* Preda Mihăilescu, "Primary cyclotomic units and a proof of Catalan's conjecture", J. Reine Angew. Math. 572 (2004), 167–195. MR2076124

* Preda Mihăilescu, "Reflection, Bernoulli numbers and the proof of Catalan's conjecture", European Congress of Mathematics, 325–340, Eur. Math. Soc., Zürich, 2005. MR2185753