Famous Mathematicians Trivia
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49 free Famous Mathematicians trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 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 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which ancient Greek mathematician wrote the Elements?
Euclid
Euclid: very little is known about his life, yet his Elements shaped geometry until the early 19th century.
Q 02Archimedes asked for which two shapes to be placed on his tomb?
A sphere and a cylinder
A sphere and a cylinder: Cicero later found what he took to be his neglected tomb, overgrown with brambles, and had it cleared.
Q 03In which Sicilian city did Archimedes live and die during a Roman siege?
Syracuse
Syracuse: his war machines are said to have held up the besieging Romans for a long time before a soldier killed him when the city fell.
Q 04Pythagoras founded his secretive school in which southern Italian town?
Croton
Croton: after the city crushed its neighbour Sybaris around 510 BC, his followers were drawn into its political feuds.
Q 05Thales of Miletus believed all of nature was based on which single substance?
Water
Water: he pictured the Earth floating on it and is said to have explained earthquakes as the water rocking it.
Q 06Which city was home to Hypatia, the ancient mathematician and philosopher?
Alexandria
Alexandria: caught up in a feud between the city's prefect and its bishop, she was murdered by Christians in 415.
Q 07Which number did the 7th-century Indian mathematician Brahmagupta first give rules for calculating with?
Zero
Zero: his rules for it included that zero divided by zero is zero, a result modern mathematics does not accept.
Q 08The word algebra comes from the title of a treatise by which Baghdad scholar?
Al-Khwarizmi
Al-Khwarizmi: his own name, Latinised as Algoritmi, also gave English the word 'algorithm'.
Q 09Which Persian mathematician solved cubic equations geometrically by intersecting conic sections?
Omar Khayyam
Omar Khayyam: he also led the observatory team that revised the Persian calendar for Sultan Malik-Shah.
Q 10Fibonacci's book that popularised Indo-Arabic numerals in Europe was called what?
Liber Abaci
Liber Abaci: its puzzle about breeding rabbits is why the famous number sequence carries his name.
Q 11Pierre de Fermat wrote his famous 'Last Theorem' in the margin of a book by which ancient Greek?
Diophantus
Diophantus: Fermat noted that he had a truly remarkable proof, which the margin of the Arithmetica was too small to contain.
Q 12Who finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem?
Andrew Wiles
Andrew Wiles: he first read about the problem at ten, in a book from his local library, and came back to it as a professor.
Q 13The SI unit of which quantity is named after Blaise Pascal?
Pressure
Pressure: in 1648 he showed that air pressure falls with height, using barometer readings taken on the Puy de Dôme.
Q 21Gauss helped identify which dwarf planet by predicting its orbit?
Ceres
Ceres: Giuseppe Piazzi spotted it in 1801 but lost it behind the Sun, and Gauss's predicted orbit let astronomers find it again.
Q 22Which Italian-born mathematician wrote the Mécanique analytique?
Joseph-Louis Lagrange
Joseph-Louis Lagrange: in Revolutionary France he sat on the Academy's committee on weights and measures that worked on the metric system.
Q 23Which mathematician, called the French Newton, examined Napoleon at the École Militaire in 1785?
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Pierre-Simon Laplace: Napoleon later made him interior minister, then replaced him after only six weeks.
Q 14Which invention did Blaise Pascal begin building in 1642, aged 18?
A calculator
A calculator: he built it to ease his father's tax work, but its cost and complexity meant few machines were ever sold.
Q 15Which philosopher-mathematician united geometry and algebra into analytic geometry?
René Descartes
René Descartes: he agreed to tutor Queen Christina of Sweden at 5 a.m. in Stockholm and died that winter.
Q 16Isaac Newton shares credit for calculus with which German polymath?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Newton developed calculus first, but it is Leibniz's notation that became the standard.
Q 17Leibniz is credited with devising which number system that underlies modern computing?
Binary
Thomas Harriot had quietly devised the same system decades earlier.
Q 18Which Swiss mathematician founded graph theory and topology and introduced the notion of a function?
Leonhard Euler
Leonhard Euler: he became almost totally blind, yet kept up his enormous output with help from his sons and scribes.
Q 19Bernoulli's principle, explaining the aeroplane wing, is named for which member of the Basel family?
Daniel
Daniel: when he and his father Johann shared the Paris Academy's 1734 prize, Johann was furious and banned him from his house.
Q 20At 19, Gauss proved the constructibility of which polygon, the first such advance in 2,000 years?
Heptadecagon
Heptadecagon: it can be built because 17 is a Fermat prime.
Q 24Under what male pseudonym did Sophie Germain correspond with Carl Friedrich Gauss?
Monsieur Le Blanc
Monsieur Le Blanc: she borrowed the name of a real former student, fearing the ridicule a woman in science would face.
Q 25Which French teenager founded group theory and died in a duel at 20?
Évariste Galois
Évariste Galois: an ardent republican, he was jailed for illegally wearing an artillery uniform and fought the fatal duel soon after his release.
Q 26Which Norwegian proved the general quintic cannot be solved in radicals, then died at 26?
Niels Henrik Abel
Niels Henrik Abel: to save on printing costs he squeezed his first proof into six pages.
Q 27Which French mathematician rigorously proved calculus's key theorems, pioneering real analysis?
Augustin-Louis Cauchy
Augustin-Louis Cauchy: after the 1830 revolution he did not swear allegiance to the new regime and lost his posts in Paris.
Q 28Whose 1859 paper on counting primes posed a Millennium Prize Problem?
Bernhard Riemann
Bernhard Riemann: his geometry of curved spaces later gave Einstein the mathematical frame for general relativity.
Q 29Which English mathematician turned logic into algebra with two-valued operators in 1847?
George Boole
George Boole: the son of a shoemaker, he became professor of mathematics at Queen's College, Cork.
Q 30Ada Lovelace is often called the first computer programmer for her work on whose analytical engine?
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage: the engine was never built, yet her notes set out how it could calculate Bernoulli numbers.