50 free Famous Mathematicians trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
From Euclid's Elements to Perelman refusing the Fields Medal, the history of mathematics is full of prodigies, feuds, duels and unlikely heroes. This quiz is about the people behind the theorems. It covers the ancient Greeks, the Islamic Golden Age and India, the calculus rivalry of Newton and Leibniz, Euler, Gauss and the 19th-century giants, the pioneers who broke barriers like Sophie Germain, Emmy Noether, Sofya Kovalevskaya and Katherine Johnson, and the 20th-century figures from Ramanujan and Turing to Erdős, Mandelbrot, Wiles and Mirzakhani. About a third of the questions are classroom-easy, a third are medium and the rest are for math history buffs. Every answer is checked against each mathematician's reference biography.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which ancient Greek is known as the father of geometry for his treatise the Elements?
Euclid
He worked in Alexandria around 300 BC and deduced his theorems from a small set of axioms.
Q 02Archimedes asked for which two shapes to be placed on his tomb?
A sphere and a cylinder
Cicero later visited the tomb in Syracuse; Archimedes had found the relation between the two volumes.
Q 03In which Sicilian city did Archimedes live and die during a Roman siege?
Syracuse
He was killed by a Roman soldier despite orders that he be spared.
Q 04Pythagoras founded his secretive school in which southern Italian town around 530 BC?
Croton
Initiates were sworn to secrecy and lived a communal, ascetic life.
Q 05Thales of Miletus believed all of nature was based on which single substance?
Water
He even thought the Earth floated on it; he is often called the first Greek philosopher.
Q 06Hypatia, the first female mathematician whose life is well recorded, taught in which city?
Alexandria
She was murdered by a mob in March 415 AD during a feud between the prefect Orestes and Bishop Cyril.
Q 07Which Indian mathematician is credited as the first to formalize the concept of zero?
Brahmagupta
His 628 treatise also gave the first clear description of the quadratic formula.
Q 08The word algebra comes from the title of a treatise by which Baghdad scholar?
Al-Khwarizmi
Al-Jabr gave the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations around 820.
Q 09Which Persian poet-mathematician first solved cubic equations in general using conic sections?
Omar Khayyam
His astronomy also underpins the Persian calendar still in use.
Q 10Fibonacci's 1202 book that popularized Indo-Arabic numerals in Europe was called what?
Liber Abaci
The famous sequence appeared in it as a worked example about rabbits.
Q 11What does the nickname Fibonacci mean?
Son of Bonacci
His real name was Leonardo Bonacci, or Leonardo da Pisa.
Q 12Which French mathematician wrote his Last Theorem in the margin of a copy of Diophantus?
Pierre de Fermat
He was also a lawyer at the parlement of Toulouse and a skilled poet.
Q 13Who finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem, earning the 2016 Abel Prize?
Andrew Wiles
He set out in 1986 after reading Ken Ribet's work and convinced a colleague by 1993.
Blaise Pascal wrote a significant treatise on conic sections at what age?
Q 21At 19, Gauss proved the constructibility of which polygon, the first such advance in 2,000 years?
Heptadecagon
The 17-sided figure made his name; he later directed the Göttingen Observatory.
Q 22Gauss helped identify which dwarf planet by predicting its orbit?
Ceres
The work led to his method of least squares, discovered before Legendre published it.
Q 23Which Italian-born mathematician succeeded Euler in Berlin and wrote Mécanique analytique?
Joseph-Louis Lagrange
He was born Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia and later helped decimalize Revolutionary France.
16
His father Étienne, a tax collector, educated him; the SI unit of pressure bears his name.
Q 15What early calculating machines did Pascal begin building in 1642?
Pascalines
They made him one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.
Q 16Which philosopher-mathematician united geometry and algebra into analytic geometry?
René Descartes
The Cartesian coordinate system is named after him.
Q 17Isaac Newton shares credit for calculus with which German polymath?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Newton developed it first, but Leibniz's notation became the standard.
Q 18Leibniz is credited with devising which number system that underlies modern computing?
Binary
Thomas Harriot had quietly devised the same system decades earlier.
Q 19Which Swiss mathematician founded graph theory and topology and introduced the notion of a function?
Leonhard Euler
He spent most of his adult life in Saint Petersburg and Berlin.
Q 20Bernoulli's principle, explaining the aeroplane wing, is named for which member of the Basel family?
Daniel
He applied mathematics to fluid mechanics and pioneered probability and statistics.
Q 24Which mathematician, called the French Newton, examined Napoleon at the École Militaire in 1785?
Pierre-Simon Laplace
He wrote the five-volume Mécanique céleste and imagined an all-predicting demon.
Q 25Under what male pseudonym did Sophie Germain correspond with Lagrange and Gauss?
Monsieur Le Blanc
She won the Paris Academy's grand prize for her work on elasticity.
Q 26Which French teenager founded group theory and died in a duel at 20?
Évariste Galois
A staunch Republican, he had been jailed for political activism shortly before.
Q 27Which Norwegian proved the general quintic cannot be solved in radicals, then died at 26?
Niels Henrik Abel
Hermite said he left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years.
Q 28Who first rigorously stated and proved the key theorems of calculus, creating real analysis?
Augustin-Louis Cauchy
He also pioneered complex analysis and permutation groups.
Q 29Whose 1859 paper on counting primes contains the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics?
Bernhard Riemann
His differential geometry also laid the mathematical foundations of general relativity.
Q 30Which English mathematician turned logic into algebra with two-valued operators in 1847?
George Boole
The shoemaker's son became the first mathematics professor at Queen's College, Cork.