Famous Mathematicians Quiz

Who is this mathematician? Clue: born in Erode, Tamil Nadu, in 1887, he is linked to the famous "taxicab number" 1729.

• Srinivasa Ramanujan
• Aryabhata
• Brahmagupta
• Bhaskara II

Answer: Srinivasa Ramanujan. Ramanujan pointed out that 1729 is the smallest number that can be written as the sum of two cubes in two ways: 1 cubed + 12 cubed and 9 cubed + 10 cubed.

Who is this? He is the ancient Greek mathematician often called the "Father of Geometry".

• Pythagoras
• Archimedes
• Euclid
• Thales

Answer: Euclid. Euclid of Alexandria organised the geometry of his time into a logical system of definitions, axioms and proofs, around 300 BCE.

India's first satellite, launched in 1975, was named after this ancient mathematician-astronomer. Who is he?

• Bhaskara
• Aryabhata
• Varahamihira
• Brahmagupta

Answer: Aryabhata. Aryabhata, who wrote the Aryabhatiya in 499 CE, gave a very accurate value of pi and explained that the Earth rotates on its axis.

Who is this? Clue: he is said to have shouted "Eureka!" after a discovery he made in his bath.

• Euclid
• Pythagoras
• Plato
• Archimedes

Answer: Archimedes. The story goes that Archimedes realised he could measure an object's volume by the water it displaces, which helped him test whether a king's crown was pure gold.

Who is this? Clue: the rule a² + b² = c² for right-angled triangles is named after him.

• Pythagoras
• Euclid
• Thales
• Hipparchus

Answer: Pythagoras. It is called the Pythagorean theorem, though the relationship was known much earlier, including in the Indian Baudhayana Sulba Sutra.

Who wrote the Brahmasphutasiddhanta (628 CE), one of the first texts to give rules for working with zero as a number?

• Aryabhata
• Brahmagupta
• Bhaskara II
• Madhava

Answer: Brahmagupta. Brahmagupta stated rules such as "a number minus itself is zero" and how zero behaves in addition, subtraction and multiplication.

Who is this? Clue: this Scottish mathematician introduced logarithms in a book published in 1614.

• John Napier
• Blaise Pascal
• Rene Descartes
• Leonhard Euler

Answer: John Napier. John Napier's logarithms turned long multiplications into simple additions, saving astronomers and navigators huge amounts of time.

Who is this? Clue: the x-y coordinate system is called "Cartesian" after him, and he also wrote "I think, therefore I am".

• Pierre de Fermat
• Blaise Pascal
• Rene Descartes
• Joseph Fourier

Answer: Rene Descartes. Rene Descartes linked algebra and geometry by describing points with numbers, which gave birth to coordinate geometry.

Which two mathematicians independently developed calculus in the late 17th century?

• Euler and Gauss
• Newton and Leibniz
• Fermat and Pascal
• Descartes and Galileo

Answer: Newton and Leibniz. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz worked separately. The dy/dx notation and the integral sign we use today come from Leibniz.

Who is this? Clue: called the "Prince of Mathematicians", he is said to have added the numbers 1 to 100 in seconds as a schoolboy.

• Leonhard Euler
• Bernhard Riemann
• David Hilbert
• Carl Friedrich Gauss

Answer: Carl Friedrich Gauss. Gauss is said to have paired 1 with 100, 2 with 99 and so on: 50 pairs that each make 101, giving 5050.

Fermat's Last Theorem stayed unproved for over 350 years until which mathematician finally proved it in the mid-1990s?

• Grigori Perelman
• Terence Tao
• Andrew Wiles
• John Nash

Answer: Andrew Wiles. Andrew Wiles of Britain completed the proof in 1994 after working on it for years, mostly in secret.

Who became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, often called the top prize in mathematics, in 2014?

• Emmy Noether
• Sofia Kovalevskaya
• Ada Lovelace
• Maryam Mirzakhani

Answer: Maryam Mirzakhani. Maryam Mirzakhani, born in Tehran, Iran, won it for her work on the geometry and dynamics of curved surfaces known as Riemann surfaces.

Who is this? Clue: this Swiss mathematician solved the "Seven Bridges of Konigsberg" puzzle in 1736, laying the foundation of graph theory.

• Leonhard Euler
• Daniel Bernoulli
• Joseph-Louis Lagrange
• Pierre-Simon Laplace

Answer: Leonhard Euler. Euler proved that no walk could cross each of the city's seven bridges exactly once, by thinking of land areas as points and bridges as lines.

Which mathematician from Kerala, around 1400, found infinite series for sine, cosine and pi, centuries before they were known in Europe?

• Bhaskara II
• Mahavira
• Madhava of Sangamagrama
• Pingala

Answer: Madhava of Sangamagrama. Madhava founded the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. Some of these series were rediscovered in Europe much later by Gregory and Leibniz.

Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman turned down the Fields Medal in 2006 after proving which famous problem?

• Riemann hypothesis
• Poincare conjecture
• Goldbach conjecture
• Twin prime conjecture

Answer: Poincare conjecture. The Poincare conjecture, about the shape of three-dimensional spaces, is the only one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems solved so far. Perelman declined that million-dollar prize too.