Dallas Banker Offers $50,000 Prize for Solution of Mathematics Problem

As a banker in Dallas, Texas, Andrew Beal has an obvious interest in numbers. But he has another interest that is not so obvious: He is interested in the mathematical theory of numbers.

An amateur mathematics enthusiast, Beal came upon a question in number theory that even the experts can't answer. The question turns out to be at the frontier of research in the field, with connections to other deep mysteries in mathematics. To spur mathematicians to solve the problem, Beal has offered a prize of $5,000 for its solution. The prize will increase by $5,000 every year up to the amount of $50,000.

Will the Beal Prize Problem become the next Fermat's Last Theorem? Indeed, it is a generalization of that famous old problem, which Pierre de Fermat proposed over 300 years ago. Like the Fermat problem, the Beal Conjecture is easily stated: If A^x + B^y = C^z, then A, B, and C have a common factor. (Here all the letters represent whole numbers, with x, y, and z bigger than 2. Two numbers have a "common factor" if there is a number that divides both of them evenly. For example, 12 and 63 have a common factor of 3.)

Another resemblance between the Beal Conjecture and Fermat's Last Theorem is that both had prizes established for their solutions. In 1996, after Andrew Wiles made international headlines by presenting the number theory arsenal that finally brought down Fermat's Last Theorem, he collected the Wolfskehl Prize. Established in 1908 with funds from the will of a German physician and amateur mathematician, Paul Wolfskehl, the Wolfskehl Prize enormously increased the fame of Fermat's Last Theorem by drawing thousands of entries from all over the globe.

The article, "A Generalization of Fermat's Last Theorem: The Beal Conjecture and Prize Problem," by Professor Daniel Mauldin, appears in the December 1997 issue of the Notices of the AMS. This article provides further details about Beal's question and its role in modern number theory. See also the web site http://www.math.unt.edu/~mauldin/beal.html.

--- Allyn Jackson