Bibliothèque de L'IMIST/CNRST

An Historical Account -- Even Exponents -- Cassels' Relations -- Cyclotomic Fields -- Dirichlet L-Series and Class Number Formulas -- Higher Divisibility Theorems -- Gauss Sums and Stickelberger's Theorem -- Mihăilescu’s Ideal -- The Real Part of Mihăilescu’s Ideal -- Cyclotomic units -- Selmer Group and Proof of Catalan's Conjecture -- The Theorem of Thaine -- Baker's Method and Tijdeman's Argument -- Appendix A: Number Fields -- Appendix B: Heights -- Appendix C: Commutative Rings, Modules, Semi-Simplicity -- Appendix D: Group Rings and Characters -- Appendix E: Reduction and Torsion of Finite G-Modules -- Appendix F: Radical Extensions.

In 1842 the Belgian mathematician Eugène Charles Catalan asked whether 8 and 9 are the only consecutive pure powers of non-zero integers. 160 years after, the question was answered affirmatively by the Swiss mathematician of Romanian origin Preda Mihăilescu. In this book we give a complete and (almost) self-contained exposition of Mihăilescu’s work, which must be understandable by a curious university student, not necessarily specializing in Number Theory. We assume very modest background: a standard university course of algebra, including basic Galois theory, and working knowledge of basic algebraic number theory.