Q 01/05

In which French city was Blaise Pascal born in 1623?

A) Aix-en-Provence

B) Clermont-Ferrand

C) Montpellier

D) Strasbourg

Answer · why

B) Clermont-Ferrand

Clermont-Ferrand. His father, a local judge, later left the town for Paris so that he could educate his gifted children himself.

Q 02/05

In 1970 Niklaus Wirth honoured Pascal by giving his name to a new what?

A) Pocket calculator

B) Programming language

C) Supercomputer

D) Operating system

Answer · why

B) Programming language

Programming language. Wirth built Pascal to teach students tidy, structured programming, and it became a staple of university computing courses.

Q 03/05

By his sister's account, the 12-year-old Pascal secretly worked out geometry proofs matching those of which ancient text?

A) Ptolemy's Almagest

B) Archimedes' On the Sphere

C) Apollonius' Conics

D) Euclid's Elements

Answer · why

D) Euclid's Elements

Euclid's Elements. His father had kept mathematics from him until his languages were mastered, but on catching the boy drawing proofs in charcoal on t...

Q 04/05

What did the 16-year-old Pascal call the six-point figure at the heart of his Essay on Conics?

A) The Golden Hexagon

B) The Mystic Hexagram

C) The Royal Hexagon

D) The Divine Figure

Answer · why

B) The Mystic Hexagram

The Mystic Hexagram. Join any six points on a conic into a hexagon and its three pairs of opposite sides meet on one straight line, a result from whic...

Q 05/05

Which philosopher shrugged off the teenage Pascal's conics essay, judging before reading half that its ideas were borrowed?

A) Pierre Gassendi

B) Thomas Hobbes

C) René Descartes

D) Marin Mersenne

Answer · why

C) René Descartes

René Descartes. He wrote to Mersenne that the boy had plainly learned it from an older geometer, a cool response to an essay admirers were calling the...