Eugène Catalan

Eugène Charles Catalan (1814–1894) was a Belgian mathematician, born in Bruges and died in Liège. From 1833, he studied at the École polytechnique in Paris, alongside Liouville among others. He subsequently held a post in Châlons-sur-Marne before returning to the École polytechnique as professor of descriptive geometry. His academic career in France was hindered by his left-wing political activism and his participation in the Revolution of 1848, after which he settled in Belgium and obtained a chair at the University of Liège. In 1874, he founded the Nouvelle correspondance mathématique with Joseph Neuberg, a journal that played an important role in disseminating mathematics within the French-speaking community. His name is associated with two major contributions: a now-famous conjecture according to which the only consecutive integers that are both proper powers are 8 and 9—a conjecture proved in 2002 by Preda Mihailescu—and a family of semiregular polyhedra, the Catalan polyhedra, which are the duals of the Archimedean solids.