50 Fun Facts About Who Am I?

I was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, decades after rewriting physics as a Bern patent clerk; who am I?

Albert Einstein was offered the largely ceremonial post by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion after President Weizmann died. He had published four groundbreaking papers in 1905 alone.

Born in Warsaw, I became the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences; who am I?

Marie Curie's notebooks are still radioactive and are expected to stay that way for well over a thousand years.

I am the only US president to hold a patent, for a device that lifted riverboats over shallows; who am I?

Abraham Lincoln received the patent in 1849, but his flotation device was never commercialized.

I ruled Egypt, yet my first language was Greek and my family descended from a Macedonian general; who am I?

Cleopatra is the only ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty known to have learned the Egyptian language.

I wrote most of my notes in mirror-image script and painted The Last Supper for a monastery; who am I?

Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper has become the most reproduced religious painting of all time.

I flew combat missions in the Korean War before commanding Apollo 11 and stepping onto the Moon; who am I?

Neil Armstrong was chosen to step out first partly because NASA managers saw him as someone without a large ego.

I won a record 22 competitive Academy Awards after co-creating a cartoon mouse in 1928; who am I?

Walt Disney also provided the voice of Mickey Mouse in the character's early years.

Born in Louisville, I won Olympic boxing gold at 18 and later lost my titles for refusing the draft; who am I?

Muhammad Ali was first steered toward boxing at 12 by a police officer who found him fuming over a stolen bicycle.

The son of a Stratford glove-maker, I wrote 154 sonnets and named my twin son Hamnet; who am I?

William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway at 18, and the couple had three children.

I disappeared from my home in December 1926 and created the fictional detective Hercule Poirot; who am I?

Agatha Christie was found at a Harrogate hotel, registered under the surname of her husband's lover.

Born on Corsica to a family of Italian origin, I trained in artillery and died on Saint Helena; who am I?

Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804, using a replica of Charlemagne's crown.

Born to a peasant family in Domrémy, I joined the relief of Orléans at about seventeen; who am I?

Joan of Arc was burned at the stake at about nineteen and canonized in 1920, almost five centuries later.

I trained as a lawyer at London's Inner Temple and led the 1930 march against Britain's salt tax; who am I?

Mahatma Gandhi walked about 240 miles from Sabarmati Ashram to the coastal village of Dandi, where he broke the salt law on 6 April 1930.

I escaped Boer captors as a young war correspondent and later won the Nobel Prize in Literature; who am I?

Winston Churchill got away by stowing aboard freight trains and hiding in a mine.

A Dutch painter, I made about 2,100 artworks in just over a decade, including The Starry Night; who am I?

Vincent van Gogh produced most of his roughly 860 oil paintings in the last two years of his life.

Born in Bonn, I kept composing as my deafness grew, and my final symphony was the Ninth; who am I?

Ludwig van Beethoven wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament, a letter to his brothers resolving to go on living for and through his art.

Born in Salzburg, I was composing by the age of five and left my Requiem unfinished at 35; who am I?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has an aria from The Magic Flute on the Voyager Golden Record, sent into space with the Voyager spacecraft.

I neglected my medical studies at Edinburgh, then spent five years sailing the world aboard HMS Beagle; who am I?

Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species in 1859, more than two decades after the voyage ended.

Born on Christmas Day 1642, I later ran England's Royal Mint and pursued counterfeiters; who am I?

Isaac Newton spent his last three decades in London as Warden and then Master of the Mint, and was knighted by Queen Anne in 1705.

Born in Pisa, I found four moons of Jupiter and spent my last years under house arrest; who am I?

Galileo Galilei was tried by the Inquisition, found vehemently suspect of heresy and forced to recant.

Nicknamed the Wizard of Menlo Park, I registered 1,093 US patents and invented the phonograph; who am I?

Thomas Edison built Menlo Park, now considered the first industrial research laboratory, and the phonograph he unveiled in 1877 first brought him wide notice.

I signed the Declaration of Independence, served as the first postmaster general and invented bifocals; who am I?

Benjamin Franklin also invented the lightning rod, and proposed proving that lightning is electricity by flying a kite in a storm.

Born Samuel Clemens in Missouri, I piloted Mississippi riverboats before writing under a famous pen name; who am I?

Mark Twain said he took his pen name from the leadsman's cry for two fathoms, a river depth that was safe water for a steamboat.

I left school at 12 to work in a boot-blacking factory while my father sat in debtors' prison; who am I?

Charles Dickens later borrowed the name of a boy he worked beside, Bob Fagin, for a character in Oliver Twist.

Born in Steventon, Hampshire, I published Emma and three other novels anonymously in my lifetime; who am I?

Jane Austen's first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, was credited only as the work of a lady.

Born in Málaga, I co-founded Cubism and painted Guernica in response to a Spanish Civil War bombing; who am I?

Pablo Picasso is also credited with inventing constructed sculpture and co-inventing collage.

Sent to a London workhouse twice before I was nine, I found worldwide fame as the Tramp; who am I?

Charlie Chaplin co-founded the distribution company United Artists in 1919, which gave him complete control over his films.

A Portuguese sailing for Spain, I led the first expedition around the world but died in the Philippines; who am I?

Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Battle of Mactan, so his crew finished the trip under the Spanish navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano.

Tutored by Aristotle until I was 16, I never lost a battle and died in Babylon; who am I?

Alexander the Great rode a horse he named Bucephalas, meaning ox-head, and named a city Bucephala after it when it died.

Born with the name Temüjin, I united the Mongol tribes and founded history's largest contiguous state; who am I?

Genghis Khan's youngest son Tolui destroyed every city that resisted in Khorasan, including Nishapur, Merv and Herat, three of the largest and wealthiest in the world.

My nine children married into royal families, earning me the nickname grandmother of Europe; who am I?

Queen Victoria reigned for more than 63 years and was granted the additional title Empress of India in 1876.

I lost my sight and hearing at 19 months old and later earned a degree from Radcliffe College; who am I?

Helen Keller, taught from childhood by Anne Sullivan, became the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.

I organised care for wounded soldiers in the Crimean War and popularised a rose-shaped statistical diagram; who am I?

Florence Nightingale became known as the Lady with the Lamp for making ward rounds among wounded soldiers at night.

I began as a star left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox before hitting 714 home runs; who am I?

Babe Ruth, nicknamed the Bambino and the Sultan of Swat, won his greatest fame as a slugging outfielder for the New York Yankees.

Born Erik Weisz in Budapest, I challenged police forces across Europe to keep me locked up; who am I?

Harry Houdini also waged a personal crusade against fake spiritualists, exposing their fraudulent methods.

The only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron, I wrote an algorithm for Babbage's analytical engine; who am I?

Ada Lovelace is often called the first computer programmer, and her method the world's first computer program.

Born to ethnic Serbs in what is now Croatia, I designed the AC induction motor licensed by Westinghouse; who am I?

Nikola Tesla ran out of funding before he could finish Wardenclyffe Tower, his planned intercontinental wireless power transmitter.

A Vienna-born Hollywood star, I co-invented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes; who am I?

Hedy Lamarr developed the idea with composer George Antheil and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Born a German princess in Stettin, I overthrew my husband Peter III to rule Russia; who am I?

Catherine the Great was born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst and married the future Peter III at the age of 16.

A goldsmith from Mainz, I completed a 42-line Bible in 1455 using my movable-type press; who am I?

Johannes Gutenberg's press allowed much faster printing, although movable type was already in use in East Asia.

The son of a poor tanner, I developed a rabies vaccine and a way to stop milk spoiling; who am I?

Louis Pasteur's vaccine was used on nine-year-old Joseph Meister in 1885 after the boy was badly mauled by a rabid dog.

A mathematician from Syracuse in Sicily, I was killed by a Roman soldier during the city's siege; who am I?

Archimedes is said to have run naked through the streets after a bath showed him how to measure a golden crown's volume.

Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, I fled a revolution with my family and fronted the rock band Queen; who am I?

Freddie Mercury wrote 10 of the 17 songs on the band's Greatest Hits album.

I won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, including the long jump and both sprints; who am I?

Jesse Owens had won four events and broken world records in three of them in under an hour at the 1935 Big Ten Championships.

A Danish astronomer, I lost part of my nose in a sword duel and built an observatory on Hven; who am I?

Tycho Brahe was assisted in his final year by Johannes Kepler, who used his data to develop three laws of planetary motion.

I left Tangier at 21 for a pilgrimage to Mecca and later dictated my journeys as The Rihla; who am I?

Ibn Battuta set out on a pilgrimage that would ordinarily take sixteen months, but he did not return to Morocco for 24 years.

Under a pen name, I feigned insanity to expose an asylum and circled the globe in 72 days; who am I?

Nellie Bly made the record-breaking trip in emulation of Phileas Fogg, the fictional traveller created by Jules Verne.

A Kenyan activist, I founded the tree-planting Green Belt Movement and won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize; who am I?

Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to win the prize, and the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate.

A marine biologist, I wrote Silent Spring, the 1962 book that led to a US ban on DDT; who am I?

Rachel Carson met fierce opposition from chemical companies, yet her book spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy.

A NASA mathematician, I checked a computer's orbit numbers after John Glenn refused to fly without my check; who am I?

Katherine Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, a year before the film Hidden Figures told her story.