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Eugène Charles Catalan (May 30,1814 - February 14,1894) was a Belgian mathematician.
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Biography
He was born in Brugge, Belgium but learned mathematics at École Polytechnique, Paris, where he met Joseph Liouville. In 1834, he was expelled from his university, so he went to Châlons-sur-Marne, where he received a post after graduating. In 1838, he came back to the École Polytechnique, with the help of Liouville, to teach descriptive geometry. Though, as he was strong-left politically active, he had an animated career. He died in Liège, Belgium where he had received a chair.
Work
He worked on continued fractions, descriptive geometry, number theory and combinatorics. He gave his name to a unique surface (periodic minimal surface in the space <math>\mathbb{R}^3<math>) that he discovered in 1855. Before that, he had stated the famous Catalan's conjecture, which was published in 1844 and was eventually proved in 2002, by the Swiss mathematician Preda Mihăilescu. He introduced the Catalan numbers to solve a combinatorial problem.
See also
External links
- http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/Esprit/Catalan.htm
- MacTutor biography of Catalan (http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Catalan.html)
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