At Berkeley

On a bulletin board in the mathematics department at UC Berkeley, somebody had left a flier offering a $300 reward for a solution to the equation x^5 + ax^4 + bx^3 + cx^2 + dx = e in terms of a, b, c, d and e. If you studied college level math, you know this problem is unsolvable. The insolubility of the quintic is proved as part of Galois theory in the second semester of undergraduate abstract algebra. I am not sure if this was a hoax or exactly what the purpose of this flier might have been, but this being Berkeley several people had scribbled sarcastic offers to square the circle (another problem that has been proven to be unsolvable) or to prove that pi is a natural number.