This is an exposition of the recent work of Bugeaud, Hanrot and Mihăilescu showing that Catalan’s conjecture can be proved without using logarithmic forms and electronic computations.

The subject of the talk is the recent work of Mihăilescu, who proved that the equation $x^p-y^q=1$ has no solutions in non-zero integers $x,y$ and odd primes $p,q$. Together with the results of Lebesgue (1850) and Ko Chao (1865) this implies the celebratedconjecture of Catalan (1843): the only solution to $x^u-y^v=1$ in integers $x,y\>0$ and $u,v\>1$ is $3^2-2^3=1$. Before the work of Mihăilescu the most definitive result on Catalan’s problem was due to Tijdeman (1976), who proved that the solutions of Catalan’s equation are bounded by an absolute...

The triples $(x,y,z)=(1,z^z-1,z)$, $(x,y,z)=(z^z-1,1,z)$, where $z\in \mathbb{N}$, satisfy the equation $x^y+y^x=z^z$. In this paper it is shown that the same equation has no integer solution with $min\{x,y,z\}>1$, thus a conjecture put forward by Z. Zhang, J. Luo, P. Z. Yuan (2013) is confirmed.