Paul Friedrich Wolfskehl (1856-1906) was a mathematician born in Darmstadt. He bequeathed 100,000 marks (equivalent to 1,000,000 pounds in today’s money) to the first person to prove or disprove Fermat's Last Theorem. Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland (federal state) of Hessen in Germany. ... Pierre de Fermats informal conjecture written in the margin of his book proved to be one of the most intriguing and enigmatic math problems ever devised. ...

He was the younger of two sons of a rich Jewish banker, Joseph Carl Theodor Wolfskehl. His older brother, the jurist Wilhelm Otto Wolfskehl, took over the family bank after the death of his father. Paul became a doctor of medicine. At about this time, he began to suffer from multiple sclerosis, which eventually forced him to pursue another career. He chose mathematics.

There are a number of theories concerning the prize's origin. The most romantic is that he was spurned by a young lady and decided to commit suicide, but was distracted by what he thought was an error in a paper by Ernst Kummer, who had detected a flaw in Augustin Cauchy's attempted proof of Fermat's famous problem. This rekindled his will to live and, in gratitude, he established the prize. This story was traced by Philip Davis and William Chinn in their 1969 book 3.1416 and All That to renowned mathematician Alexander Ostrowski, who supposedly heard it from another, unidentified source. Another, more prosaic story claims that Wolfskehl wanted to leave as little as possible to his shrewish wife. Yet another story, told in "The man who loved only numbers" by Mark Hoffman, tells that Wolf actually missed his supposed suicide time because he was in the library studying the Theorem. Upon realizing that, he concluded that the contemplation of mathematics was more rewarding than a beautiful woman so he decided not to kill himself. He bankrolled the Theorem because it "saved his life". Ernst Eduard Kummer (29 January 1810 in Sorau, Brandenburg, Prussia - 14 May 1893 in Berlin, Germany) was a German mathematician. ... Augustin Louis Cauchy Augustin Louis Cauchy (August 21, 1789 – May 23, 1857) was a French mathematician. ... Alexander Markowich Ostrowski (25 September 1893, Kiev, Ukraine - 20 Nov 1986, Montagnola, Lugano, Switzerland), was a mathematician. ...

In any case, on June 28, 1997, the prize was finally won by Andrew Wiles. By then, due in part to the hyperinflation Germany suffered after the end of World War I, the award had dwindled to £30,000. For the French mathematician with work in the area of elliptic curves, see André Weil. ... Certain figures in this article use scientific notation for readability. ...

See also

• Andrew Beal, a Dallas banker who has offered $100,000 for a proof or disproof of Beal's conjecture

Andrew Andy Beal (born 1952) is a Dallas, Texas-based businessman. ... Beals conjecture is a conjecture in number theory proposed by the Texas billionaire and mathematical amateur Andrew Beal. ...

External links

• Details about Wolfskehl from Simon Singh, author of the book Fermat's Last Theorem

References

• Ball, W. W. R. and Coxeter, H. S. M. Mathematical Recreations and Essays, 13th ed. New York: Dover, pp. 69-73, 1987.
• Barner, K. "Paul Wolfskehl and the Wolfskehl Prize." Not. Amer. Math. Soc. 44, 1294-1303, 1997.
• Hoffman, P., The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth, New York: Hyperion, pp. 193-199, 1998.