Eugène Charles Catalan, Belgian-French mathematician and academic (b. 1814)
Eugène Charles Catalan (30 May 1814 – 14 February 1894) was a French and Belgian mathematician who worked on continued fractions, descriptive geometry, number theory and combinatorics. His notable contributions included discovering a periodic minimal surface in the space
R
3
{\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{3}}
; stating the famous Catalan's conjecture, which was eventually proved in 2002; and, introducing the Catalan number to solve a combinatorial problem.