Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
All 10 questions with answers and explanations. Play this daily
Q 01The pioneering computer scientist behind Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm was from which country?
Netherlands
Netherlands. Rotterdam-born Edsger Dijkstra solved the shortest-path problem in 1956 for a demonstration of a new computer at Amsterdam's Mathematical Centre.
Q 02Which cryptographer is the R in the RSA encryption algorithm?
Ron Rivest
Ron Rivest. With Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman he made RSA public, but GCHQ's Clifford Cocks had devised an equivalent system in 1973 that stayed secret until 1997.
Q 03Robert Boyer co-created a tail-first string-search algorithm with which computer scientist?
J Strother Moore
J Strother Moore, whose first name really is just the letter J. Their algorithm checks a pattern from its last character, so it can skip ahead through the text.
Q 04Which Greek mathematician's greatest-common-divisor algorithm is one of the oldest known?
Euclid
Euclid, who set it out in his Elements around 300 BC, though scholars think the Elements largely compiles results from earlier Greek mathematicians.
Q 05Newton's root-finding method also honours which mathematician, who published a simpler version?
Joseph Raphson
Joseph Raphson. His version, like Newton's, worked only on polynomials, and Thomas Simpson later recast it as the calculus-based form taught today.
Q 06Donald Knuth and James Morris share the name of a string-matching algorithm with whom?
Vaughan Pratt
Vaughan Pratt, who published it with Knuth and Morris in 1977, though Morris had conceived it first and Knuth discovered it independently.
Q 07The word 'algorithm' derives from the Latinized name of which Islamic Golden Age mathematician?
Al-Khwarizmi
Al-Khwarizmi. A Latin translation of his arithmetic book rendered his name Algoritmi, and the title of his treatise Al-Jabr gave English the word algebra.
Q 08Richard Bellman's shortest-path algorithm shares its hyphenated name with which other mathematician?
Lester Ford Jr.
Lester Ford Jr. actually published the method in 1956, two years before Richard Bellman did.
Q 09Which MIT student's term paper produced the compression code now used inside JPEG, MP3 and ZIP files?
David Huffman
David Huffman. Offered a term paper instead of the final exam, he was about to give up when he hit on a frequency-sorted tree that beat his professor Robert Fano's own code.
Q 10Hans Peter Luhn, who patented the credit-card checksum formula, worked at which company?
IBM
IBM. Luhn's check digit still ends every payment card number, and it catches any single mistyped digit.