Best sources for the history of prize money for open mathematical problems

Question

I'm a science/math journalist [ger] and currently I'm working on an article about prize money for open problems (Millennium Prize Problems and such). One section will be about the history of prize money and rewards. While I know about the culture of betting and rewards for open problems in the Lwow school and Erdös' faible for betting and rewarding, I wonder if there is a reliable source on the history of such rewards. In particular I'm interested in the question since when have money rewards for open problems started being a thing in mathematics and what some of the historic examples for such rewards are.

Thank you for helping me out :-)

The King of Sweden (Oscar II) put a bounty on finding an analytic solution for the three-body problem. This makes for quite an interesting story. — Carl-Fredrik Nyberg Brodda, Sep 14 '22 at 10:36
Great, thank you! Yes, those kinds of stories are what I was searching for :-) — j grk, Sep 14 '22 at 11:07
Consider asking on the History of Science and Mathematics Stack Exchange: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/ — aorq, Sep 14 '22 at 12:55
One of the most famous such rewards was the Wolfskehl Prize. — Timothy Chow, Sep 14 '22 at 23:02
for pointers to some of the older mathematical contests (many of which included a monetary prize), see https://mathoverflow.net/questions/242178/mathematics-contests-before-1800 — Carlo Beenakker, Sep 15 '22 at 06:17
A closely related question on [hsm.se]: When did bounties and prize money for open mathematical problems start being a thing? — Martin Sleziak, Sep 15 '22 at 12:36
Some such problems are listed in answers to this question: Open problems with monetary rewards. — Martin Sleziak, Sep 15 '22 at 12:41
I think this one qualifies as a state-of-art (2023) Math price US$10.000.000. It is not related to a specific open math problem but to AI for solving general math problems: https://aimoprize.com/ — Jorge Zuniga, Dec 22 '23 at 12:05

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 15 '22 at 05:53

Here is a long list of Mathematics awards and many of them have a prize money too (you can click on each of them in order to read more and find winners data).
Another couple of important prizes to mention (without taking into account the Clay Mathematics Institute prize of $1,000,000$ USD for each of the well-known Millennium Problems) are the $1,000,000$ USD cash prize for the first person able to prove the Beal Conjecture, the $120,000,000$ JPY (i.e., more than $1,000,000$ USD) for the first mathematician who will solve the Collatz conjecture (see Prize for the Collatz conjecture). Lastly, it is worth to mention the $2,000$ USD prize (plus a bottle of champagne) waiting for the first solver of each of the problems listed on this page: 2,000 USD prizes.

Best sources for the history of prize money for open mathematical problems

1 Answers1