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A Historical Account

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Abstract

This is a very brief overview of the history of Catalan’s problem.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The journal was founded in the same year by the École Polytechnique teachers Gerono and Prouhet and was mainly addressed to the young candidates of the École Polytechnique and École Normale Supérieure.

  2. 2.

    Victor Amédée Lebesgue (1791–1875), not the much more famous Henri Léon Lebesgue.

  3. 3.

    Trygve Nagell (sometimes spelled as Nagel, 1895–1988).

  4. 4.

    Sigmund Selberg (1910–1994), the elder brother of Atle Selberg.

  5. 5.

    Kustaa Inkeri (1908–1997).

  6. 6.

    Recall that he was one of the founders of the Nouvelles Annales de Mathématiques.

  7. 7.

    A similar condition occurred in the work of Wieferich [138] on the Fermat equation; see Sect. 2.3.3.

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Bilu, Y.F., Bugeaud, Y., Mignotte, M. (2014). A Historical Account. In: The Problem of Catalan. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10094-4_1

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