Catalan numbers, Catalan solids, Catalan minimal surface, and Catalan's conjecture are all named for their discoverer, Belgian mathematician Eugene Catalan. Catalan discovered Catalan numbers while he was trying to decompose regular polygons into triangles. Catalan numbers are a sequence of natural numbers that represent the number of ways a polygon with n sides can be divided into triangles without intersecting diagonals.
Catalan taught at l'École Polytechnique de Paris in France. He published extensively on continued fractions (fractions in which the powers of real numbers are continually added to the denominator) and number theory. Catalan proposed his famous conjecture in 1844, but it took mathematicians until 2002 to finally prove it.
