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 :-)



Best sources for the history of prize money for open mathematical problems
Here is a long list of [Mathematics awards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bakuage-offers-prize-of-120-million-jpy-to-whoever-solves-collatz-conjecture-math-problem-unsolved-for-84-years-301326629.html)).
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](https://unsolvedproblems.org/).


