Innocent-looking problems involving whole numbers can stymie even the most astute mathematicians. As in the case of Fermats last theorem, centuries of effort may go into proving such tantalizing, deceptively simple conjectures in number theory.
Now, Preda Mihailescu of the University of Paderborn in Germany finally may have the key to a venerable problem known as Catalans conjecture, which concerns the powers of whole numbers.
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