A billionaire has offered $1 million to whoever can solve a complicated math problem that's been puzzling experts for years, ABC News reported.
Andrew Beal, who has a net worth of $8 billion, will offer the reward to anyone who can either prove or disprove what is now known as the "Beal Conjecture."
Beal first offered the reward at $5,000 in 1997, and has continued to raise it as time goes on and it remains unsolved.
Now, the prize has gone up to $1 million, with the added requirement that the findings must be published in a mathematics journal.
Beal has a certain obsession with this particular problem, which was originally called Fermat's Last Theorem and is about 350-years old.
The theorem is essentially the idea that "Ax + By = Cz." Beal discovered that A, B, and C all must have a common numerical factor in order for theorem to be solved, hence the Beal Conjecture.
"Others have looked at other closely related problems, but I believe Beal was the first to express it in that way," Don McClure, the executive director of the American Mathematical Society.
Beal went to Daniel Mauldin, who was a mathematics professor at the University of North Texas. They came up with the idea to offer a prize to whoever could prove Beal's theory.
"Any solution to this problem would signal a real new idea and not minor progress," Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, said.
Hundreds of submissions have been sent in over the past decade or so, but none of them have worked out.
"It's impossible to keep up with them, and none of them fit," Mauldin said.
Beal wants to inspire young people to be interested in math the way he himself was inspired by who Andrew Wiley, who solved Fermat's Last Theorem and collected prize money in 1994.
"I'd like to inspire young people to pursue math and science," Bea said in a statement. "Increasing the prize is a good way to draw attention to mathematics generally. ... I hope many more young people will find themselves drawn into the wonderful world of mathematics."
