How smart is Andrew Beal? Smart enough to astonish some of the smartest people on earth.
By Melinda Rice

   As a banker and businessman, Andrew Beal uses his number-crunching abilities to make money. As a mathematician, he puts his number-crunching abilities to another use.

   “Oh no. No. No. I’m not a mathematician,” says the entrepreneur, and the modesty is sincere. “I’m just a hobbyist. I dabble in number theory.”

   Two years ago, Beal stunned the rarefied realm of academic mathematicians by coming up with something none of them had thought of—a numerical puzzle that has since been dubbed the Beal Conjecture.

   He worked on the problem himself, then threw it out for the world to ponder, offering a prize to whoever can come up with a proof. Beal recently added 25,000 additional incentives to the original $50,000 award.

   The American Mathematical Society, which administers the award, receives about 20 calls each month about the proof. A few of the callers are cranks; many are students—some as young as junior high school age—and the rest are a mixed bag of academics, reporters, and the merely curious.

   “This helps stimulate interest and research in this field. It’s at the very cutting edge of mathematical development,” says R. Daniel Mauldin, the University of North Texas professor who chairs the AMS prize committee. He’s referring to the Beal Conjecture, not the prize money.

   But the cash incentive is unusual, too. Glory, not greenbacks, is often the only reward for unraveling mathematical mysteries.

   One famous exception is Fermat’s Last Theorem, a problem posed by French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in the mid-1600s. Fermat was reading a chapter by the ancient Greek mathematician Diophantus on a particular problem in Pythagorean number theory (these problems tend to hang around for a while) when he scribbled next to the text, “I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.” He died before he could share his proof with anyone, leaving historians and mathematicians baffled for the next 300 years. German physician Paul Wolfskehl, who died in 1906, was so intrigued by the question that he bequeathed 100,000 marks to whoever solved it, setting a deadline of September 12, 2007.

   Princeton University Professor Andrew Wiles claimed the prize in 1993, but a gap in his reasoning was discovered, so he went back to the drawing board. Two years later, the professor offered a conclusive proof that the equation xn + yn = zn has no non-zero integer solutions for x, y, and z when n is greater than 2. Wiles’ proof, however, is very complicated, and that has left mathematicians wondering whether Fermat’s own proof—the one he didn’t write down—wasn’t much simpler.