Andrew Beal might be called a man with a restless intellect. At the moment, contemplating a reporter’s question in his office, he’s a man with restless fingers.

   He fiddles with a binder clip, toys with the cord of the phone on his cluttered desk, picks up several papers in rapid succession, glances at them, and puts them back down. Then he rakes his hands through short, dark hair that shows the first sprinklings of grey.

   That leads his hands to the stem of his eyeglasses, so he takes them off and holds them to the light, squints through them, and puts them back on.

   Then he goes back to the binder clip. Click, click, click. He snaps it open, flicks it closed, and tosses it back into the paperclip holder on his jumbled desk.

   He makes another pass with his fingers through his, by now, disheveled hair, then laces the fingers of both hands together behind his head, tilts back in his desk chair, and gazes speculatively at the ceiling.

   And then something unusual happens.

   Hyperkinetic Andrew Beal—Highland Park father of five, banker, real estate developer, amateur mathematical theorist, and fledgling aerospace entrepreneur—is perfectly still. It lasts only as long as it takes him to consider an answer to the question.

   You seem to have a penchant for taking chances in business. Why?

   “I’m not sure I’d call it taking chances. I think of it as attributing a different level of risk to a problem than the rest of the world attributes to it. I’m not that much of a risk taker. I just take situations that people perceive to be high risk, and I decide that they can be managed to low risk. I’m really very conservative.”

   Then the motion marathon is on again.

   Risk? What risk? He’s invested tens of millions of his own dollars in an as-yet-untested product. It is being developed by a two-year-old company with no chance of making a profit for at least two more years. He’s entered an embryonic commercial aerospace industry, which is capital intensive and highly competitive.

   “People told me I was crazy. Someone said I was having a midlife crisis,” says Beal. “I thought it was a reasoned decision and continue to believe it’s a reasoned decision. It can be managed to very acceptable risk.”