Math History Trivia
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This math history trivia quiz has 60 free questions with answers, and it is about the story of mathematics rather than the sums. You will meet the Babylonian tablet that lists Pythagorean triples a thousand years before Pythagoras, the Egyptian scribe who copied the Rhind Papyrus, the Baghdad scholar whose book title became the word algebra, the Pisan merchant's son who sold Europe on the digit zero, and the two men who spent decades feuding over who invented calculus. Later rounds cover the 19th and 20th centuries: Galois writing down group theory the night before a fatal duel, Sophie Germain hiding behind a man's name, Cantor's infinities, Hilbert's 23 problems, Ramanujan's taxi-cab number, Emmy Noether's theorem, Turing at Bletchley Park, the first computer-assisted proof, and the recluse who turned down a million dollars for solving the Poincaré conjecture. The set is built for math teachers, pub quiz hosts and anyone who likes the human side of the subject. Difficulty runs from easy warm-ups to a few questions that will stretch a math major, and every answer was checked against Wikipedia or a primary source before it went in.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which papyrus, bought in Luxor in 1858 by a Scottish antiquarian, is a key source on ancient Egyptian mathematics?
The Rhind Papyrus
The Rhind Papyrus is named for Alexander Rhind, who went to Egypt because of lung disease and excavated tombs around Thebes.
Q 02Which civilisation made Plimpton 322, a c.1800 BC tablet listing Pythagorean triples?
Babylonian
Babylonian scribes listed triples far too large to find by trial and error, which suggests a systematic method over a thousand years before Pythagoras.
Q 03The Ishango bone, a possible 20,000-year-old tally stick, was found in which modern country?
Democratic Republic of the Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo was then the Belgian Congo, so the bone's Belgian finder took it to Brussels.
Q 04Which Greek philosopher argued that swift Achilles could never overtake a tortoise given a head start?
Zeno of Elea
Zeno of Elea is thought to have built the paradox to defend his teacher Parmenides, who held that change is impossible and motion an illusion.
Q 05Pythagoras is said to have banned his followers from eating which food?
Fava beans
Fava beans were so taboo that, in one legend, Pythagoras let his pursuers catch and kill him rather than run through a bean field.
Q 06Euclid, author of the Elements, spent his career in which city around 300 BC?
Alexandria
Alexandria's ruler, Ptolemy I, is said to have asked Euclid for a shortcut through geometry, and was told there is no royal road.
Q 07Which of Euclid's postulates resisted centuries of attempted proofs?
Parallel
Every attempt to prove the parallel postulate failed, and around 1830 Lobachevsky and Bolyai instead built whole geometries in which it does not hold.
Q 08Cicero reported finding Archimedes' tomb topped with which two shapes?
A sphere and a cylinder
A sphere and a cylinder illustrated his favourite proof, yet by Cicero's day locals had forgotten the tomb, which lay hidden under brambles.
Q 09Archimedes was a native of which city, which he defended with war machines against Roman invasion?
Syracuse
Syracuse held off Rome's siege with his machines, but its outer walls were breached in 212 BC when Romans scaled them during a festival to Artemis.
Q 10Which Chinese mathematician's 263 CE commentary on The Nine Chapters proved the Pythagorean theorem and refined pi?
Liu Hui
Liu Hui openly left one volume problem he could not solve to a future mathematician, and Zu Chongzhi and his son later cracked it.
Q 11Late in life, Hypatia advised the Roman prefect Orestes in his political feud with which bishop?
Cyril
Rumours that she kept Orestes from reconciling with Cyril are blamed for her murder by Christians in March 415.
Q 12Which Indian mathematician's treatise records that he was 23 years old in 499 CE?
Aryabhata
That puts Aryabhata's birth in 476 CE, and India later named its first satellite, launched in 1975, after him.
Q 13Which 7th-century Indian mathematician first set out rules for calculating with zero as a number?
Brahmagupta
Brahmagupta got one rule wrong, declaring that zero divided by zero is zero, a division modern arithmetic leaves undefined.
Q 21In which ancient book's margin did Fermat scribble his 'last theorem' around 1637?
Arithmetica by Diophantus
Arithmetica by Diophantus held the note, and the world saw it only after Fermat died, when his son Samuel reprinted the book with his father's comments.
Q 22Which calculating machine did a French teenager begin building in 1642 to ease his tax-commissioner father's sums?
The Pascaline
The Pascaline went through about 50 prototypes, but few machines sold, and production stopped.
Q 23Which astronomer urged Newton to write the Principia, then paid to print it?
Halley
Halley covered the printing costs himself because the Royal Society had no money left to publish the book.
Q 14The House of Wisdom, home to 9th-century Abbasid mathematicians, was in which city?
Baghdad
Baghdad's House of Wisdom turned Greek science into Arabic, and those translations fed a wave of original research by its scholars.
Q 15The English word 'algebra' comes from the shortened title of a treatise by which scholar?
Al-Khwarizmi
Al-Khwarizmi's own name, mangled in medieval Latin translations of his arithmetic, also gave English the word algorithm.
Q 16Fibonacci, whose 1202 Liber Abaci popularised Hindu-Arabic numerals in Europe, was from which Italian republic?
Pisa
In 1240 Pisa granted Fibonacci a salary for advising the city on accounting and for teaching its citizens.
Q 17Which Latin word did Fibonacci use for zero?
Zephyrum
Zephyrum came from the Arabic sifr and became the Italian zero, while sifr's other descendant, cipher, came to mean a secret code.
Q 18Which letter stands for 500 in Roman numerals?
D
D, for 500, is said to have begun as half of the old Roman sign for 1,000.
Q 19John Napier, inventor of logarithms, considered his commentary on which Bible book his most important work?
Revelation
Revelation was the subject of A Plaine Discovery, which won Napier a reputation on the Continent through Dutch, French and German translations.
Q 20Descartes's 1637 essay La Géométrie was published as an appendix to which of his works?
Discourse on the Method
Discourse on the Method carried La Géométrie as a worked example, beside essays on optics and weather, to show his method got results.
Q 24Who published the first paper on calculus, 'Nova Methodus pro Maximis et Minimis', in 1684?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published first, yet a bitter priority dispute with Newton's supporters consumed his last years.
Q 25Which mathematician popularised the Greek letter pi for the circle ratio and first wrote f(x)?
Leonhard Euler
Leonhard Euler went totally blind, yet with help from assistants his output did not slow.
Q 26Graph theory grew out of a puzzle about walking across the seven bridges of which city?
Königsberg
Königsberg's walk proved impossible, because all four of its land areas touched an odd number of bridges.
Q 27Whose 1706 book contains the earliest known use of the Greek letter pi for a circle's circumference-to-diameter ratio?
William Jones
William Jones grew up poor on Anglesey, where a landowner spotted his talent at a charity school and found him work in London.
Q 28Sophie Germain wrote to Lagrange and Gauss under which male pseudonym?
Monsieur Le Blanc
Monsieur Le Blanc was unmasked after she asked a French general to protect Gauss during the occupation of his town, and Gauss asked who had sent him.
Q 29Which regular polygon did 19-year-old Gauss prove constructible with compass and straightedge?
The 17-sided heptadecagon
The 17-sided heptadecagon proof led Gauss to the rule for which regular polygons can be built at all, published five years later in his Disquisitiones Arithmeticae.
Q 30Which 20-year-old French mathematician, whose work founded group theory, died in 1832 from duel wounds?
Évariste Galois
Poisson rejected Évariste Galois's memoir as unclear, and its worth was recognised only when Liouville studied his papers a decade after the duel.