Don’t Bet on Winning This Prize

The prize for a proof or a counter example to Andrew Beal’s mathematical conjecture recently touched $1,000,000

Mathematics has a way of keeping its patrons indulged for ridiculously extended periods of time, on problems that are incredibly easy to state. June 23 marked the 20th anniversary of Andrew Wiles’ proof of the Fermat’s Last Theorem (FLT), on which he spent six years of his life. FLT states that Aⁿ+Bⁿ=Cⁿ has no solutions for n>2, where A, B and C are positive integers. Ironically, no sooner had Wiles announced his proof, a banker by the name of Andrew (double irony) Beal, while studying the generalizations of the theorem, made a conclusion in the same year which we today know as Beal’s conjecture, and which to-date remains unproved and unchallenged. Beal’s conjecture states that if A^x+B^y=C^z, where A, B, C, x, y, and z are positive integers with x, y, z > 2, then A, B, and C have a common prime factor (a factor which is only divisible by itself and 1). FLT can be restated as a special case of the Beal’s conjecture with x=y=z. American Mathematical Society (AMS) has now announced a prize worth $1,000,000 for a proof or a counter example to the Beal’s conjecture. It took 358 years’ worth of effort for the ghost of Pierre de Fermat to finally find peace, after the final and complete proof of his conjecture was published in 1995. How long will Beal, who is 60, have to wait?

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Siddhartha Gupta