Sophie Germain
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40 free Sophie Germain trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sophie Germain taught herself mathematics in a house where she was not supposed to study it, at a time when no French college or learned society would admit a woman. She went on to win one of the country's top scientific prizes and to leave her name on a family of prime numbers that still matters to anyone who sends a password over the internet. This quiz collects the best fun facts about Sophie Germain: the childhood stories, the borrowed identity, the letters to the great mathematicians of Europe, the long fight for a prize almost nobody else dared to enter, and the honours that arrived too late for her to see. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so each question doubles as a fact worth keeping. It suits students writing about women in science, teachers looking for a classroom warm-up, and anyone who enjoys a story about stubbornness paying off. No advanced maths is needed.
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Q 01Which male pseudonym did Sophie Germain use to send her work to mathematicians who might dismiss a woman?
Monsieur Le Blanc
Monsieur Le Blanc was a real former student in Paris whose name she borrowed, fearing what she later called the ridicule attached to a female scientist.
Q 02How did Sophie Germain's parents try to stop their teenage daughter from studying mathematics at night?
Removed her fire and clothes
Her parents removed her fire and clothes at night, hoping the cold would keep her in bed. She wrapped herself in quilts, lit hidden candles and carried on with her sums anyway.
Q 03Which German mathematician did Sophie Germain ask a French general to protect when troops occupied his home town?
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Carl Friedrich Gauss was baffled when an officer asked after him on behalf of a Mademoiselle Germain: he knew his pen friend only by a man's name, and her confession soon followed.
Q 04Which Paris landmark was built bearing the names of 72 French men of science, but not Sophie Germain's?
The Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower was built with 72 names in raised letters beneath its first balcony, all of them men, although Germain's own mathematics fed into the engineering of the tower itself.
Q 05Sophie Germain took up mathematics after reading how which ancient thinker was killed while absorbed in geometry?
Archimedes
Archimedes, the story goes, was cut down by a Roman soldier because he would not leave his diagram. The 13-year-old Germain decided that a subject so gripping deserved her whole attention.
Q 06Which ruler, impressed by a demonstration of sound made visible on metal plates, set the prize Sophie Germain later won?
Napoleon
Napoleon watched a German physicist make metal plates sing in Paris and set a prize for explaining the patterns. For years Germain was the only person who dared to enter.
Q 07Sophie Germain made early progress on which famous problem, finally solved in the 1990s after centuries of effort?
Fermat's Last Theorem
Fermat's Last Theorem beat everyone from 1637 until Andrew Wiles in 1994. Germain's plan was the first to attack whole families of exponents at once instead of one number at a time.
Q 08The Academy prize that Sophie Germain finally won in 1816 was a medal containing a kilogram of which metal?
Gold
Gold, a full kilogram of it, rewarded her final entry in a contest so daunting that almost nobody else in France would attempt it.
Q 09The crater Germain, some 35 kilometres wide and named after Sophie Germain, lies on which world?
Venus
Venus has a naming rule that every crater honours a famous woman or carries a female first name, so the crater Germain keeps exclusively female company in the southern hemisphere.
Q 10What did Sophie Germain do on the day the Paris Academy of Sciences awarded her its grand prize in 1816?
Skipped the ceremony
She skipped the ceremony, to the disappointment of a public that had turned out to see the first woman ever to win a prize from the Academy.
Q 11Which Paris landmark fell when Sophie Germain was 13, leaving her shut indoors with her father's books?
The Bastille
The Bastille fell when she was 13, and with unrest in the streets she was kept at home, where a history of mathematics on her father's shelves changed the course of her life.
Q 12Which two languages did the teenage Sophie Germain teach herself so that she could read Newton and Euler?
Latin and Greek
Latin and Greek were the languages of much classic science, so she taught herself both from her father's library before moving on to advanced texts on calculus.
Q 13Which illness did Sophie Germain work through for two years, still writing papers, before it killed her in 1831?
Breast cancer
Q 21In cryptography, which word describes the larger prime that is paired with each Sophie Germain prime?
Safe
Safe primes are prized in public-key cryptography: key exchanges such as Diffie–Hellman rely on them, which gives Germain's idea from the early 1800s a daily job in online security.
Q 22Sophie Germain's death certificate ignored her mathematics and recorded her occupation as what?
A property holder
A property holder, rentière in French, is all the official wrote: a woman living on private income, with no hint of the prize-winning scientist she had been.
Q 23By most accounts, what was the trade of Sophie Germain's father, Ambroise-François, in eighteenth-century Paris?
Silk merchant
Breast cancer was diagnosed in 1829, and despite the pain she finished papers on number theory and on the curvature of surfaces that appeared in print the year she died.
Q 14Which actress plays Catherine, who discusses Sophie Germain with a fellow mathematician, in the 2005 film Proof?
Gwyneth Paltrow
Gwyneth Paltrow had already played Catherine on the London stage before the film, in which her character talks about Germain and her special primes with a student played by Jake Gyllenhaal.
Q 15Sophie Germain was born in Paris in the same year that which country declared its independence?
United States
United States independence was declared in July 1776, three months after Germain's birth on 1 April, and she was a teenager when revolution reached her own country.
Q 16Sophie Germain was a pioneer of which branch of physics, later vital to engineering great iron and steel structures?
Elasticity
Elasticity is the study of how solids deform and spring back, and Germain's prize essay reached the correct differential equation for a thin plate despite her patchy training.
Q 17In the experiments behind Sophie Germain's prize essay, what was sprinkled on a metal plate to reveal patterns of sound?
Sand
Sand skips away from the parts of a bowed plate that shake and gathers along the lines that stay still, drawing stars and grids that Germain set out to predict with an equation.
Q 18Which Paris school, opened in 1794, barred Sophie Germain as a woman yet let outsiders request its lecture notes?
École Polytechnique
École Polytechnique made its lecture notes available to anyone who asked, so Germain followed its courses from home. The school did not admit its first women students until 1972.
Q 19Which professor asked to meet a gifted student who sent him written work, only to find it was Sophie Germain?
Joseph-Louis Lagrange
Joseph-Louis Lagrange did not mind in the least that his star correspondent was a young woman: he became her mentor and friend and made his colleagues aware of her talent.
Q 20A prime number p counts as a Sophie Germain prime when which related number is prime as well?
2p + 1
2p + 1 must be prime too, so 11 qualifies because 23 is prime, while 7 fails because 15 is not. Germain met such primes while attacking a famous unsolved equation.
Silk merchant is the usual answer, though some accounts make him a goldsmith first. His well-stocked library is where his daughter discovered mathematics.
Q 24Sophie Germain never received the honorary degree that an admirer wanted for her from which German university?
Göttingen
Göttingen never gave her the degree. A professor there, her old German correspondent, said she had shown that a woman could excel in the most rigorous of the sciences and deserved one.
Q 25Which first name did Sophie Germain share with her mother and her elder sister, perhaps explaining why she used Sophie?
Marie
Marie began all three names: her mother and elder sister were both Marie-Madeline and she was Marie-Sophie, so going by Sophie may simply have kept the household straight.
Q 26Which relative of Sophie Germain collected her philosophical writings and had them published after she died?
Her nephew
Her nephew Armand-Jacques Lherbette, her elder sister's son, gathered the essays, including one arguing that the sciences and the humanities do not differ in substance.
Q 27In the revolutionary year of 1789, Sophie Germain's father was elected a deputy for Paris representing which group?
The Third Estate
The Third Estate, the commoners, soon turned itself into the National Assembly, so talk of politics and philosophy probably filled the Germain home while Sophie was growing up.
Q 28What did Sophie Germain's second, anonymous entry for the Academy's prize contest earn from the judges in 1813?
An honourable mention
An honourable mention was all the judges would give: the entry was littered with errors and, they said, the fundamental base of her theory was still not established.
Q 29How did Sophie Germain's prize-winning essay finally appear in print in 1821, five years after it won?
At her own expense
At her own expense she had it printed, chiefly so that she could set her theory against a rival's and point out the errors in his method.
Q 30Sophie Germain's grave lies in which Paris cemetery, the largest within the city?
Père Lachaise
Père Lachaise holds her gravestone, and a plaque marks the house on the rue de Savoie where she died; the honours came only after a biography revived her name in the 1870s.