News That Won't Interest Grigori Perelman

$1 Million now at stake!....

 Beal's Conjecture popped up in the news today. It's another one of those somewhat simple sounding, but very difficult-to-prove notions [a sort of take-off of Fermat's Last Theorem, but much more recently (1993) formulated], which now has a new $1 million bounty on its head:

The simple statement of it runs as follows:

If  A^x + B^y = C^z where A, B, C, x, y, z are all positive integers with x, y, z > 2 then A, B, and C have a common factor.

Read more about it here:

http://www.ams.org/profession/prizes-awards/ams-supported/beal-prize

It made the news because the originator, banker and dabbler in number theory, Andrew Beal, has just upped the ante to the $1 million mark for anyone who can prove the conjecture (bringing it in line, monetarily, with the Clay Institute Millennium Problems), and hopefully encouraging more takers.


You'll likely want to employ some programming skills to work on it, and on a sidenote, the always worth-reading John McGowan has some interesting things to say below about the push to teach coding/programming to all young people:

http://math-blog.com/2013/06/04/programming-is-not-a-super-power/