Q 01/05

John Napier is said to have caught a thieving servant using which animal, secretly covered in soot?

A) A raven

B) A rooster

C) A tomcat

D) A greyhound

Answer · why

B) A rooster

A rooster dusted with soot did the trick: Napier told his servants it would crow when the thief stroked it, then looked for the one pair of clean hand...

Q 02/05

John Napier reportedly caught the pigeons raiding his crops by scattering grain laced with what?

A) Opium

B) Birdlime

C) Alcohol

D) Sulphur

Answer · why

C) Alcohol

Alcohol left the birds too drunk to fly away, so Napier simply gathered them up, a feat that looked like sorcery to his neighbours.

Q 03/05

John Napier's calculating rods are nicknamed 'bones' because many were carved from which material?

A) Ivory

B) Antler

C) Horn

D) Coral

Answer · why

A) Ivory

Ivory rods looked so much like bones that the name stuck, though Napier himself called his method rabdology, a word he coined for reckoning with rods.

Q 04/05

John Napier's Bible calculations predicted that which event would come in 1688 or 1700?

A) The fall of Rome

B) A second Great Flood

C) The conversion of Spain

D) The end of the world

Answer · why

D) The end of the world

The end of the world was due by 1700 on his reading of Revelation, and Napier counted his book on it, not his mathematics, as his most important work.

Q 05/05

The neper, a unit named after John Napier, is an alternative to which unit of signal level?

A) The hertz

B) The ohm

C) The decibel

D) The kilowatt

Answer · why

C) The decibel

The decibel is built on base-10 logarithms while the neper uses natural ones, and its odd spelling follows the Latin form of Napier's surname.