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[...] Paul Erdős, became perhaps the most notorious mathematician of the 20th century. Erdős spent nearly his entire life crashing on other mathematicians' couches and subsisting on the small sums he received for giving talks at universities around the world. He also had a fondness for devising math problems and offering bounties to anyone who could solve them.
"Over the years it was kind of a habit he had to say, 'Here's a nice problem, I thought about it for a while, and I don't see how to solve it. Maybe it's a $25 problem or possibly a $100 problem,'" said Ronald Graham, a mathematician at the University of California, San Diego, and a longtime friend of Erdős's.
In offering small prizes, Erdős was continuing a tradition that flourished in Poland in the early 20th century in cafés where young mathematicians gathered to match wits and push against the frontiers of mathematics.
[...] In that culture, it was also common for mathematicians to back a newly posed problem with a prize — a bottle of wine or a nice meal to whoever could pull the sword from the stone.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @01:35AM
The incentive for winning a prize from Erdős would be the kudos of having won it, not the small cash value of prize itself. Like having a low "Erdős number", it would confer some status in math society.
In order for that status to live on, either the cash value has to increase, or the person offering the prize has to have a similar celebrity status to Erdős. Just naming it after him doesn't cut it.
It would be like me offering "The AC-Newton-Einstein-Fermi Prize for Astrophysics" consisting of $10 for discovering an alien civilisation. If one is discovered, t's not going to be because of my $10.