The abc ConjectureOpen Problem
Formulated in 1985 by Joseph Oesterlé and David Masser as an arithmetic distillation of Szpiro's conjecture on elliptic curves, the abc conjecture makes a deceptively simple claim about coprime triples with a + b = c: the three numbers cannot all be built from many repeated small primes at once, so c can only rarely exceed rad(abc)^(1+ε). Dorian Goldfeld called it 'the most important unsolved problem in Diophantine analysis,' and for good reason — a single proof would cascade through number theory, delivering Fermat's Last Theorem for all large exponents almost for free, along with Roth's theorem, the Mordell–Faltings theorem, the Fermat–Catalan conjecture, infinitely many non-Wieferich primes, and all but finitely many counterexamples to Beal's conjecture. Since 2012 Shinichi Mochizuki has claimed a proof via inter-universal Teichmüller theory, published in 2021, but the community has not accepted it: in 2018 Peter Scholze and Jakob Stix identified a gap they regarded as fatal. A precise formal statement gives everyone a shared, machine-checkable target around which to organize verified progress.