Fermat’s last theorem is just one of many examples of innocent-looking problems that can long stymie even the most astute mathematicians. It took about 350 years to prove Fermat’s tantalizing conjecture.
Now, Preda Mihailescu of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has proved a theorem that is likely to lead to a solution of Catalan’s conjecture, another venerable problem involving relationships among whole numbers. He describes his result in a paper to be published in the Journal of Number Theory.