Q 01/05

I was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, decades after rewriting physics as a Bern patent clerk; who am I?

A) Niels Bohr

B) Albert Einstein

C) Erwin Schrödinger

D) Max Planck

Answer · why

B) Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was offered the largely ceremonial post by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion after President Weizmann died. He had published four ground...

Q 02/05

Born in Warsaw, I became the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences; who am I?

A) Lise Meitner

B) Dorothy Hodgkin

C) Barbara McClintock

D) Marie Curie

Answer · why

D) Marie Curie

Marie Curie's notebooks are still radioactive and are expected to stay that way for well over a thousand years.

Q 03/05

I am the only US president to hold a patent, for a device that lifted riverboats over shallows; who am I?

A) Abraham Lincoln

B) Thomas Jefferson

C) Theodore Roosevelt

D) Ulysses S. Grant

Answer · why

A) Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln received the patent in 1849, but his flotation device was never commercialized.

Q 04/05

I ruled Egypt, yet my first language was Greek and my family descended from a Macedonian general; who am I?

A) Nefertiti

B) Hatshepsut

C) Cleopatra

D) Zenobia

Answer · why

C) Cleopatra

Cleopatra is the only ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty known to have learned the Egyptian language.

Q 05/05

I wrote most of my notes in mirror-image script and painted The Last Supper for a monastery; who am I?

A) Sandro Botticelli

B) Leonardo da Vinci

C) Michelangelo

D) Caravaggio

Answer · why

B) Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper has become the most reproduced religious painting of all time.