Prime Effort: Powerful conjecture may be proved

Innocent-looking problems involving whole numbers can stymie even the most astute mathematicians. As in the case of Fermat’s last theorem, centuries of effort may go into proving such tantalizing, deceptively simple conjectures in number theory (SN: 11/5/94, p. 295).

Now, Preda Mihailescu of the University of Paderborn in Germany finally may have the key to a venerable problem known as Catalan’s conjecture, which concerns powers of whole numbers.