50 Fun Facts About STEM

Which Hollywood star co-invented a frequency-hopping radio system to stop torpedoes being jammed?

Hedy Lamarr patented the idea in 1942 with composer George Antheil. The US Navy turned it down, but related methods went on to protect Bluetooth signals from interference.

Which programming language did Guido van Rossum name after a British television comedy troupe?

Python honours Monty Python's Flying Circus, which its creator was enjoying while he built the language. Its tutorials swap the usual placeholder names for spam and eggs, a nod to one of the troupe's sketches.

What name did a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew coin for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros?

Googol was the suggestion of Milton Sirotta, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner. Google later took its company name from a respelling of the word.

Which fastener did George de Mestral invent after studying burrs stuck to his dog's fur?

Velcro copies the hundreds of tiny hooks he saw on the burrs under a microscope. Its name blends the French words velours and crochet, meaning velvet and hook.

Which scientist is the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two sciences, physics and chemistry?

Marie Curie's papers are still so radioactive that they are kept in lead-lined boxes. Anyone who wants to consult them must wear protective clothing.

Which car part did Mary Anderson patent, reportedly after seeing a streetcar driver battle sleet?

The windshield wiper she designed was a hand-operated blade. Buyers saw no commercial value in it, and her patent expired in 1920 without ever reaching mass production.

Which shape are the wax cells of a honeycomb, a pattern that uses the least building material?

Hexagon grids split a flat surface into equal cells with the least total wall. Writers suspected as much around 36 BC, yet mathematicians only proved it in 1999.

Which NASA mathematician did John Glenn ask to recheck a computer's sums before his 1962 orbit?

Katherine Johnson verified the new electronic computer's figures, and Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. Her story reached millions through the 2016 film Hidden Figures.

Which pair of bicycle makers from Dayton, Ohio, made the first controlled powered aeroplane flights?

The Wright brothers believed that balancing a bicycle showed an unstable flying machine could be mastered with practice. Their shop repaired cycles and built its own brand.

Which element, purified to make computer chips, gave a famous California technology valley its name?

Silicon is the second most abundant element in Earth's crust, after oxygen, making up about 28% of it. Chip makers need it in an extremely pure form.

Which daughter of Lord Byron wrote what is often called the first published computer program?

Ada Lovelace's method told Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine how to work out Bernoulli numbers. The machine was never built, so she never saw her program run.

Which chemist's London lab produced Photo 51, the X-ray image that revealed the shape of DNA?

Rosalind Franklin died of cancer at 37, four years before three men shared a Nobel Prize for the DNA discovery. A colleague had shown the image to a rival without her knowledge.

Which US Navy rear admiral built an early compiler and popularised the computing term debugging?

Grace Hopper's colleagues found a moth jamming a Harvard computer relay in 1947 and taped it into the logbook. She went on to manage one of the first compilers for the business language COBOL.

Which doctor and engineer became the first African American woman in space aboard Endeavour?

Mae Jemison opened each shift in orbit with a salute borrowed from Star Trek, the series that fed her interest in space. She later appeared in an episode of The Next Generation.

Which physicist became the first American woman in space aboard the shuttle Challenger in 1983?

Sally Ride later sat on the panels that investigated the loss of both Challenger and Columbia, the only person to serve on both. Two Soviet women had reached orbit before her.

Which bulletproof-vest fibre did Stephanie Kwolek invent at DuPont while seeking lighter tyres?

Kevlar is five times stronger than steel for its weight. Its first commercial use, in the early 1970s, was as a replacement for the steel in racing tyres.

Which New York landmark did Emily Roebling help finish after her engineer husband became bedridden?

Brooklyn Bridge duties fell to her for more than ten years as she relayed her husband's instructions to the site. She was first to cross it by carriage, carrying a rooster as a sign of victory.

Which medical pioneer was also a statistician who drew rose-shaped charts of army deaths?

Florence Nightingale's diagrams showed season by season what was killing patients in the military hospital she ran. Her design, a relative of the pie chart, became known as the rose diagram.

Which subject does the acronym STEAM add to science, technology, engineering and mathematics?

The arts joined the acronym to bring creative approaches and imaginative design into technical lessons. The Rhode Island School of Design championed the change from STEM to STEAM.

Which gas do plants take in through leaf pores called stomata to make sugar in photosynthesis?

Carbon dioxide enters through the stomata, but a plant cannot open them without losing water vapour at the same time. The oxygen plants release is a by-product of splitting water.

Which space object did Jocelyn Bell Burnell detect as radio blips nicknamed little green men?

Pulsar signals proved to come from rapidly rotating neutron stars. The discovery earned the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics, but she was not among the people who received it.

Which cell part, nicknamed the cell's powerhouse, carries its own DNA inherited from the mother?

The mitochondrion has a genome like a bacterium's, evidence that its ancestors were free-living microbes that merged with larger cells. A 1957 magazine article popularised the powerhouse nickname.

Which element, the lightest of all, makes up about three quarters of normal matter in the universe?

Hydrogen's commonest form is the simplest atom there is: one proton, one electron and no neutrons. Counted atom by atom, it makes up more than 90 percent of the universe.

Which English scientist set out three laws of motion and universal gravitation in the Principia?

Isaac Newton also built the first reflecting telescope and showed that a prism splits white light into colours. He spent his last three decades in London running the Royal Mint.

Which naturalist's voyage on HMS Beagle shaped the theory of evolution by natural selection?

Charles Darwin was still writing up the idea in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay describing the same theory. The two men's papers were presented together in London.

Which chemist left gaps in his periodic table and predicted the elements that would fill them?

Dmitri Mendeleev described three unknown elements so accurately that gallium, scandium and germanium matched his forecasts when they were found. Element 101 is named after him.

Which temperature scale used by scientists starts at absolute zero, the coldest anything can get?

Kelvin starts counting at about −273 °C, so water freezes at roughly 273 on the scale. It honours the British scientist Lord Kelvin, who proposed an absolute scale in 1848.

Which of the classic simple machines is at work in a seesaw, a crowbar and a pair of pliers?

Lever tools trade distance for force: a long push at one end shifts a heavy load a short way at the other. Archimedes set out the rule behind them in the third century BC.

Which Lyme Regis fossil hunter found the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton as a child?

Mary Anning could not join the Geological Society of London because she was a woman, though its members valued her finds. She also unearthed the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons.

Which computer scientist invented the World Wide Web while working at the CERN physics laboratory?

Tim Berners-Lee made the idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. He also devised HTML, the language web pages are written in.

Which mathematician helped break Germany's Enigma cipher and proposed a test for thinking machines?

Alan Turing was chosen for the Bank of England's £50 note, first issued on his birthday in 2021. His imagined universal machine became the model for the general-purpose computer.

Which computer, completed in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania, was programmed by six women?

ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. Its six programmers were picked from at least 200 women hired to work out weapon trajectories by hand.

Which technology relies on Gladys West's precise mathematical models of Earth's shape?

GPS satellites would make huge errors without an accurate model of Earth, which is not a perfect sphere. West spent years programming an IBM computer to refine the calculations.

Which NASA rocket, standing 111 metres tall, launched Apollo astronauts on their way to the Moon?

Saturn V made its final launch carrying Skylab, the first American space station. Skylab itself had been converted from one of the rocket's own third stages.

Which engineer developed an alternating current motor after a short spell working for Thomas Edison?

Nikola Tesla built his induction motor in 1887, and Westinghouse's company took it up for the AC system it was already selling. AC spread because it carries power well over long distances.

Which shipping shortcut opened in 1914 uses locks to lift vessels 26 metres to an artificial lake?

The Panama Canal's summit, Gatun Lake, was made by damming a river so that far less rock had to be dug out. Gravity alone refills the locks with water from the lake.

Which ancient building in Rome is crowned by the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built?

The Pantheon's dome is exactly as high as it is wide, 43 metres, so a perfect sphere would fit inside. A round opening at the very top, the oculus, is open to the sky.

Which kitchen appliance did Josephine Cochrane invent and show at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair?

The dishwasher came about after some of her heirloom dishes were chipped during hand washing. Hotels and restaurants, rather than homes, were her first big customers.

The word robot was introduced by a 1920 play about artificial workers written in which language?

Czech gave English the word through Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., short for Rossum's Universal Robots. It grew from robota, a term for forced labour or drudgery.

Which Greek letter names a circle's circumference divided by its diameter, celebrated each 14 March?

Pi cannot be written exactly as a fraction, so its decimal digits run on forever without settling into a repeating pattern. Written the American way, the date 3/14 matches its first three digits.

Which branch of mathematics is named after an Arabic word in the title of a book by al-Khwarizmi?

Algebra comes from al-jabr, an Arabic term that originally described the setting of broken bones. The author's own name, in its Latin spelling, gave English the word algorithm.

Which one-sided surface can be made by giving a paper band a half twist and joining its ends?

A Möbius strip shape makes machine belts last longer, because the whole surface wears evenly instead of only the inside. Two German mathematicians described it independently in 1858.

Which Stanford professor was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, a top prize in mathematics?

Maryam Mirzakhani solved problems by drawing doodles on sheets of paper and writing formulas around them. Her 2014 medal honoured work on the geometry of curved surfaces.

Which programmer led MIT's work on Apollo flight software and coined the term software engineering?

Margaret Hamilton's software raised priority warnings when computer alarms went off three minutes before the first Moon landing. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Which physicist's experiment showed parity is not conserved, winning two colleagues a Nobel Prize?

Chien-Shiung Wu, nicknamed the First Lady of Physics, had earlier helped separate uranium for the Manhattan Project. She received the first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.

Which mathematician proved the theorem that links each symmetry in physics to a conservation law?

Emmy Noether worked without pay for seven years after her doctorate, then lectured for four years under a male colleague's name. Einstein ranked her as the most important woman in mathematics.

Which physicist co-discovered nuclear fission yet was left out of Otto Hahn's Nobel Prize?

Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch gave the process its name, fission, in a 1939 paper. Element 109, meitnerium, was named in her honour in 1997.

Which geneticist found that genes can change position on chromosomes by studying maize kernels?

Barbara McClintock made the discovery in the 1940s but waited until 1983 for her Nobel Prize, which she did not have to share. Shifting colour patterns in the kernels gave the moving genes away.

Which acronym did America's National Science Foundation use for the same four subjects before STEM?

SMET stood for science, mathematics, engineering and technology, the same subjects in a different order. The foundation's administrators adopted the newer acronym in 2001.

Which ancient Greek gives his name to the theorem linking the three sides of a right triangle?

Pythagoras was born more than a thousand years after Babylonian scribes were already using the rule. No surviving Greek text from the five centuries after his life credits him with it.