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Banker Offers $1M To Solve Beal Conjecture

Posted by timothy on from the it's-no-fermat's-but-hey dept.

oxide7 writes "A Texas banker with a knack for numbers has offered $1 million for anyone who can solve a complex math equation that has stumped mathematicians since the 1980s. The Beal Conjecture states that the only solutions to the equation A^x + B^y = C^z, when A, B and C are positive integers, and x, y and z are positive integers greater than two, are those in which A, B and C have a common factor. Like most number theories, it's "easy to say but extremely difficult to prove.""

4 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Couldn't you just make up any old equation... by Viol8 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... along with some postulated constraints and ask people to prove them? Whats so special about this one - does it have some mathematical relevance?

    1. Re:Couldn't you just make up any old equation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That's essentially what Carl Friedrich Gauss said when he was challenged to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. Something on the lines of: "I have no real interest in such endeavors since I could easily put forward a multitude of propositions which one could neither prove nor disprove."

  2. Re:Or it could come full circle... by semi-extrinsic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We have a fairly good hunch what Fermat's actual "proof in the margin" was. I can't remember how it goes, but it falls apart because rings Z^n with n>13 are no longer Unique Factorization Domains (UFD: a ring where all numbers have a single unique prime factorization) (or something like that). The concept of something not being a UFD was unheard of at the time of Fermat. Disclaimer: it's a few years since I did Algebra, so there may be errors in this post.

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  3. Re:Brute force? by GameboyRMH · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Maybe if I present it in the form of a cryptography scheme for terrorist communications...

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