Famous Fathers Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Famous Fathers trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Fatherhood runs through history in two directions. Some men are remembered as the 'father of' a whole field, from medicine and geometry to the internet and video games, while others are remembered for the children they raised: presidents whose sons reached the same office, racing families who kept winning the same race, composers whose boys outgrew them. These 50 questions cover the title-holders and the dynasties: who first coined a famous honorific, which fathers and sons both lifted the same trophy, and how many children the great novelists, scientists and composers actually had. Each answer comes with a short explanation and a source. It suits pub quiz setters, Father's Day hosts and anyone who likes a fact that starts 'his father was...'. The questions open broad and get harder as you go.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 'Father of His Country' raised his wife Martha's two children but never had a child of his own?
George Washington
George Washington and Martha had no children together, so the man hailed as the nation's father was a stepfather, and later guardian to her grandchildren at Mount Vernon.
Q 02Martin Luther King Jr. and his father, 'Daddy King', were both born with which first name, changed in 1934?
Michael
Michael King came home from a 1934 Baptist congress in Berlin and began calling himself Martin Luther King, renaming his five-year-old eldest son to match.
Q 03Apple's 1983 Lisa, officially an acronym, was really named after whose daughter, as he later admitted?
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson 'Obviously it was named for my daughter', while Apple's marketing team reverse-engineered the acronym from the name in late 1982.
Q 04Which king fathered three of the five Tudor monarchs, who each took the throne in turn?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII broke with Rome hunting for a male heir, yet his son Edward VI died at 15 and it was his daughters Mary I and Elizabeth I who ruled for most of the next half-century.
Q 05A 2003 study tied a Y-chromosome lineage in some 16 million men, from China to Uzbekistan, to which ruler?
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan's male line was the authors' explanation for a haplogroup carried by about 8% of men across that belt of Asia, a pattern matching ethnic groups believed to descend from him.
Q 06Before George W. Bush, who was the only son of a U.S. president to reach the White House himself?
John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams lost the White House after one term, as his father had, then spent 17 years in the House of Representatives leading the fight against the gag rule on anti-slavery petitions.
Q 07Which pioneering analyst put his own youngest child, Anna, into analysis with himself in 1918?
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud's sixth child Anna went on to become a founder of child psychoanalysis, and returned to her father's couch for further analysis from 1924 to 1929.
Q 08Which pharaoh, who reigned for 66 years, is credited with between 88 and 103 children?
Ramesses II
Ramesses II's mummy flew to Paris for conservation in 1976, and the tale that it was issued a passport is a myth, perhaps born of the French word 'passeport' used for its paperwork.
Q 09Which player, son of NBA veteran Dell, passed Ray Allen as the league's all-time three-point leader?
Stephen Curry
Stephen Curry became the NBA's all-time leader in three-pointers in the 2021–22 season, having first honed his shot against younger brother Seth on the family court in Charlotte.
Q 10Francis Ford Coppola gave his infant daughter Sofia her acting debut in which 1972 film's baptism scene?
The Godfather
The Godfather put Sofia Coppola on screen as an infant, and three decades later her film Lost in Translation (2003) won her the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Q 11Which Greek physician, called the Father of Medicine, was born on the island of Kos around 460 BC?
Hippocrates
Hippocrates gives his name to the oath new doctors have traditionally sworn, though modern scholars doubt he wrote it himself.
Q 12Which 'father of the computer' designed a Difference Engine that was only built to his plans in 1991?
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage never finished his engines, yet when a Difference Engine was finally constructed from his original drawings in 1991 it worked exactly as designed.
Q 13Which Halicarnassus-born chronicler of the Greco-Persian Wars did Cicero dub 'the Father of History'?
Herodotus
Herodotus earned Cicero's title with the Histories, yet the strange stories and folk-tales he reported also earned him a second nickname from critics: 'the Father of Lies'.
Q 21Which French philosopher coined the word 'sociology' and later founded a secular 'Religion of Humanity'?
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte first called his new science 'social physics', coined 'sociology' once the statistician Adolphe Quetelet had taken that name, and later founded a Religion of Humanity to replace traditional worship.
Q 22Which first president of Turkey was granted a surname by parliament in 1934 that means 'Father of the Turks'?
Mustafa Kemal
Mustafa Kemal became Atatürk under the 1934 Surname Law, which made every citizen take a family name, and parliament barred anyone else in the republic from adopting his.
Q 23Which composer, music director to the Esterházy family for decades, is called 'Father of the Symphony'?
Q 14Which co-designer of TCP/IP with Bob Kahn later served as Google's 'Chief Internet Evangelist'?
Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf shares the title 'father of the Internet' with Kahn for the 1970s protocol suite that still routes traffic today, and held the Google post from 2005.
Q 15Subhas Chandra Bose first called which leader 'Father of the Nation' in a 1944 radio broadcast?
Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi had long been 'Bapu' to Indians, roughly meaning father, but the formal title came from Bose, his rival on strategy, who asked for his blessing over Azad Hind Radio.
Q 16Which lawyer, revered in Pakistan as Quaid-e-Azam, became the new country's first governor-general in 1947?
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Muhammad Ali Jinnah is also Baba-e-Qaum, Father of the Nation, and his birthday remains a national holiday; he died barely a year into the job, in 1948.
Q 17Which Scottish-born 'Father of the American Navy' ended his career as a rear admiral in the Russian navy?
John Paul Jones
John Paul Jones, who fought the Bonhomme Richard to victory off Flamborough Head in 1779, later joined the Imperial Russian Navy and fought Ottoman forces before accusations drove him out.
Q 18Which 'father of geometry' worked in Alexandria around 300 BC, yet almost nothing of his life is known?
Euclid
Euclid's Elements dominated geometry teaching for some two thousand years, yet most of what is said about the man comes from Proclus and Pappus writing centuries later.
Q 19Which 'father of economics' became the first Scot to appear on a Bank of England banknote, in 2007?
Adam Smith
Adam Smith is said to have been carried off by travellers at age three and quickly rescued; he reached the Bank of England's £20 note 231 years after The Wealth of Nations appeared.
Q 20Which Delft draper became 'the Father of Microbiology' with single-lens microscopes of his own design?
Leeuwenhoek
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek ran a cloth shop from 1654 and taught himself science, yet his home-made lenses made him the first person to see and experiment with microbes.
Joseph Haydn
Joseph Haydn, also dubbed father of the string quartet, spent much of his life at Eszterháza in rural Hungary, taught Beethoven and mentored Mozart.
Q 24Which French baron who co-founded the International Olympic Committee had his heart buried at Olympia?
Pierre de Coubertin
Pierre de Coubertin was buried in Lausanne, but at his own wish his heart was taken to Greece and sealed in a memorial at Olympia, beside the site of the ancient Games he revived.
Q 25Which 'father of English poetry' became the first writer buried in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner?
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, wrote in Middle English when Latin and French ruled the page, and his burial in 1400 seeded what became Poets' Corner.
Q 26Which 'Father of Video Games' licensed his home-console design to Magnavox for the 1972 Odyssey?
Ralph Baer
Ralph Baer, whose Jewish family fled Germany just before World War II, later co-created the pattern-matching game Simon for Milton Bradley in 1978.
Q 27Which of J. S. Bach's sons, nicknamed 'the English Bach', befriended and inspired the young Mozart in London?
Johann Christian
Johann Christian Bach, the youngest of the composer's sons, met the eight-year-old Mozart on the family's grand tour, and the boy began writing his first symphonies soon afterwards.
Q 28Pierre and Marie Curie's elder daughter Irène won a 1935 Nobel Prize with her husband for discovering what?
Induced radioactivity
Induced radioactivity was found by Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie in early 1934, so her mother Marie lived to see the discovery but died the year before it won the couple their Nobel.
Q 29Milton Wright, who gave his sons Wilbur and Orville a rubber-band toy helicopter, held what office?
Bishop
Bishop Milton Wright of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ took his only powered flight in 1910, a nearly seven-minute trip with Orville at the controls.
Q 30Archie Manning, father of Super Bowl winners Peyton and Eli, spent most of his NFL career with which team?
New Orleans Saints
The New Orleans Saints never managed a winning season in Archie Manning's 12 years there, and he retired without playing a playoff game, unlike his sons with four Super Bowl rings between them.