MIT Trivia
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49 free MIT trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
MIT trivia for engineers, applicants, alumni wearing the Brass Rat, and anyone who has ever measured a bridge in smoots. The quiz starts with William Barton Rogers, the geologist who got a charter signed two days before the Civil War began, the 'Boston Tech' years, the six attempts to swallow the school into Harvard, and the mysterious 'Mr Smith' whose money built the Cambridge campus in 1916. The middle rounds cover MIT's transformation: Karl Compton and Vannevar Bush, the Radiation Laboratory that rivalled the Manhattan Project, Whirlwind and Lincoln Lab, the Instrumentation Lab that guided Apollo, the 1969 research stoppage, the hacker culture born in a model railroad club, Richard Stallman's GNU, Project Athena, the Media Lab and OpenCourseWare. Later questions turn to campus life: mens et manus, Tim the Beaver, Course 6, IHTFP, the Infinite Corridor and MIThenge, the Great Dome hacks, Building 20, the Stata Center, the smoot, the Nobel count and the four MIT graduates who walked on the Moon. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Harvard, Yale and universities quizzes.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01MIT is located in which city, across the Charles River from Boston?
Cambridge
Cambridge. MIT spent its first half-century in Boston, then ferried its charter across the river on a ceremonial barge in 1916 to open the new campus.
Q 02Which war began two days after MIT was chartered?
Civil War
The Civil War. Governor John Andrew signed the charter on 10 April 1861 and the fighting began two days later, so MIT's first classes had to wait until 1865.
Q 03MIT's founder William Barton Rogers led Virginia's first state survey as a scientist in which field?
geology
Rogers's field was geology, and legend has it that his last words were 'bituminous coal': he collapsed and died while addressing MIT's graduating class in 1882.
Q 04By what informal name was MIT known in its early decades in the Back Bay?
Boston Tech
Boston Tech. The name lasted half a century, until the school, cramped and short of money in the Back Bay, finally found the funds to move across the river in 1916.
Q 05MIT was funded in its early years under which 1862 federal law?
the Morrill Land-Grant Act
The Morrill Land-Grant Act gave states land to fund colleges 'for the benefit of agriculture and the mechanic arts', so Massachusetts used it for both a new farm college and the fledgling MIT.
Q 06Which university's president, a former MIT chemistry professor, tried again and again to absorb MIT?
Harvard
Harvard. Charles Eliot pushed mergers for decades, and MIT's own board approved one over alumni protests, until a court ruled in 1905 that MIT could not sell its Back Bay land.
Q 07Which industrialist was unmasked in 1920 as 'Mr Smith', the anonymous donor behind MIT's riverside campus?
George Eastman
George Eastman, the Kodak founder, had given in secret as 'Mr Smith' since 1912; generations of students have since rubbed the nose on his bronze plaque at MIT for luck before exams.
Q 08In 1916 MIT's charter crossed the Charles on the Bucentaur, modelled on which city's ceremonial state barge?
Venice
Venice. The original Bucentaur was the doge's gilded state barge, from which he dropped a ring into the Adriatic each Ascension Day to 'wed' Venice to the sea.
Q 09What structural material did Bosworth use for MIT's Maclaurin buildings and Great Dome?
reinforced concrete
Reinforced concrete, then an unconventional and little-used building material, lies behind Bosworth's classical facades; engineer John Freeman had pushed for it over masonry walls.
Q 10Which physicist, MIT president from 1930, reorganised it into schools and pushed basic science?
Karl Compton
Karl Compton. A General Electric executive on MIT's board recruited him from Princeton, convinced that industry now needed graduates grounded in fundamental science rather than shop practice.
Q 11The wartime 'Radiation Laboratory' at MIT was a cover name for work on what?
microwave radar
Microwave radar. The name was chosen to deceive: it was meant to make outsiders think the laboratory was working on nuclear physics, and so to hide the real mission.
Q 12MIT's ramshackle Building 20, thrown up in wartime and later home to Noam Chomsky, was fondly nicknamed what?
The Plywood Palace
The Plywood Palace. Designed in less than an afternoon and meant to be torn down six months after the war, the timber building stayed in use until 1998.
Q 13MIT's off-campus Lincoln Laboratory was created in 1951 to develop what for the US military?
Q 21Which web pioneer founded the W3C at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994?
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee. He left CERN for MIT and set up the consortium so that rival vendors, then shipping incompatible versions of HTML, would agree on common open standards.
Q 22Which MIT project, announced in 2001, set out to publish nearly all its teaching materials online for free?
OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare. A faculty council that had been asked how MIT should position itself in online learning proposed giving the materials away, a plan MIT's president called 'counter-intuitive in a market driven world'.
Q 23In 2018 MIT announced a billion-dollar college of computing named after which donor?
Stephen Schwarzman
a continental air-defence radar net
Lincoln Laboratory was set up to build a continental air-defence radar net after the first Soviet atomic bomb test, in 1949, raised the threat of long-range bombers; its SAGE system ran until 1983.
Q 14'Doc' Draper's MIT Instrumentation Laboratory built the computerised guidance for which space programme?
Apollo
Apollo. The lab built the Apollo Guidance Computer that steered astronauts to the Moon, but Vietnam-era protests over its military work led MIT to spin it off as the independent Draper Laboratory in 1973.
Q 15The 4 March 1969 research stoppage at MIT against military science gave birth to which organisation?
the Union of Concerned Scientists
The Union of Concerned Scientists. Its founders, MIT faculty and students, wanted research turned away from military technology and toward pressing environmental and social problems.
Q 16Which main-memory technology did MIT's Whirlwind computer adopt in 1953?
magnetic cores
Jay Forrester's team replaced Whirlwind's unreliable storage tubes with magnetic cores in 1953, making the machine far faster and more dependable; Whirlwind was also among the first computers to run in real time.
Q 17MIT's hacker culture is traced back to which student club?
the Tech Model Railroad Club
The Tech Model Railroad Club. Its Signals and Power crowd, keener on the switching under the layout than on the trains, popularised the word 'hacker' and went on to form the nucleus of MIT's AI Lab.
Q 18Which MIT AI Lab programmer launched the GNU Project in 1983 and the Free Software Foundation in 1985?
Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman, then at the MIT AI Lab, announced GNU in September 1983 and founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, reacting to colleagues leaving for commercial Lisp-machine spinoffs.
Q 19Which network authentication protocol was created for MIT's Project Athena?
Kerberos
Kerberos. Named after the three-headed dog that guards Hades in Greek myth, it was built so that users could prove who they were without sending passwords unprotected across the campus network.
Q 20The MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by former president Jerome Wiesner and whom?
Nicholas Negroponte
Nicholas Negroponte was the lab's first director, and in 2005 he founded One Laptop per Child, the non-profit that sent low-cost laptops to schoolchildren across the developing world.
Stephen Schwarzman. The Blackstone co-founder's $350 million gift anchored a plan to create 50 faculty posts, many shared with other departments, so that every field at MIT could work with AI.
Q 24Which phrase is the English rendering of MIT's Latin motto?
mind and hand
MIT's motto, mens et manus, means mind and hand: the founders wanted knowledge joined to practice, which is why the seal sets a craftsman beside a scholar.
Q 25MIT's mascot, Tim the Beaver, was chosen in 1914 because beavers are what?
nature's engineers
Beavers are nature's engineers, alumnus Lester Gardner told a 1914 alumni dinner, having first weighed the kangaroo and the elephant; his clincher was that the beaver 'does his best work in the dark'.
Q 26At MIT, where majors go by number, what do students call Electrical Engineering and Computer Science?
Course 6
Course 6. MIT numbers its departments roughly in the order they were founded, so civil engineering is Course 1, and students use the numbers in place of the names.
Q 27The heavy MIT class ring worn by upperclass students and alumni is nicknamed what?
the Brass Rat
The Brass Rat. The 'rat' is the beaver on its gold bezel, which is said to look more like a rat, and a committee of second-year students redesigns the ring for every class.
Q 28MIT's four-week stretch of optional classes and events each January is called what?
Independent Activities Period
Independent Activities Period. First held in 1971, it is home to the Mystery Hunt, in which teams solve puzzles for days to find a 'coin' hidden somewhere on campus.
Q 29What is the long hallway through MIT's original buildings, starting at Lobby 7, called?
the Infinite Corridor
The Infinite Corridor. Civil engineering students once studied its foot traffic as a stand-in for a highway and wrote down its unwritten rules: stay right, pass left, no eye contact.
Q 30The twice-yearly event when the setting sun shines straight down MIT's longest hallway is nicknamed what?
MIThenge
MIThenge comes around 11 November and 31 January, and campus enthusiasts publish predictions timed to the second so that crowds can line the hallway for the few minutes it lasts.