Yet another example of the power of Prizes....the authors mention that they were motivated by a $500 prize offered to students by a math volunteer at their high school.

What is so counter-intuitive to me is that if the authors had wanted to earn $500 (or $250 after splitting it) they could have just got a job at McDonalds. They would have earned that money with far less time and effort.

I'm kinda glad that nobody pointed that out to them though :-)

But Prize-awards seems to put us into an entirely different economic frame. You can't say they did it just for the recognition, because if the prize wasn't there they wouldn't have bothered. But you also can't say that they did it for the money, because the money was ludicrously low--even when valued at the rate of unskilled labor.