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The Death of a Mathematician

Created by kevinatilusa

Fun Trivia : Quizzes : Scientists & Inventors
The Death of a Mathematician game quiz
"In addition to interesting proofs and theorems, mathematics has been the scene of many interesting deaths, some of which have become lost in the fabric of legend."

15 Points Per Correct Answer - No time limit  



1. Which mathematician, perhaps best known for his namesake coordinate system, can be said to have died from getting up too early in the morning?
    Blaise Pascal
    Georg Cantor
    Pierre Fermat
    Rene Descartes


2. Which mathematician, one of the first to describe the situations under which the solution to an equation can be written down exactly, was killed in a duel at the tender age of 20?
    Evariste Galois
    Pierre Fermat
    Neils Abel
    Joseph Louis-Lagrange


3. What man, discoverer of the (In)Completeness theorem for logical systems, managed to starve himself to death?
    Kurt Gödel
    Alfred North Whitehead
    Bertrand Russell
    Georg Cantor


4. What mathematician spent his final days defending Syracuse against the invading Romans, only to be killed by a soldier who supposedly saw him working out diagrams in the sand?
    Diophantus
    Pythagoras
    Euclid
    Archimedes


5. Which Norwegian Mathematician, who helped found group theory, died in poverty just days BEFORE receiving his first appointment in Berlin?
    Evariste Galois
    Neils Abel
    Joseph Louis-Lagrange
    Jean-Augustin Cauchy


6. Moving a bit further afield into POTENTIAL deaths, which mathematician, facing a trip across the storm-wracked North Sea in a rickety boat, sent a telegram ahead falsely claiming that he had solved the Riemann Hypothesis (one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics)?
    Alfred North Whitehead
    G. H. Hardy
    Bertrand Russell
    Ramanujan Srinivasin


7. What mathematician, faced with the twin handicaps of being a woman in a man's world and a Pagan in a Christian nation, was finally murdered by a mob in 415 AD?
    Hippolyta
    Hypatia
    Hypsicles
    Hippias


8. What pioneer in the field of computer science and namesake of a test for artificial intelligence was found dead with a half-eaten, cyanide laced apple beside him?
    John Von Neumann
    Alan Turing
    Charles Babbage
    Blaise Pascal


9. What pioneer in the application of rigorous methods to political science was found dead of mysterious causes in a prison cell during the French reign of terror?
    Louis Couturat
    Charles Marie de La Condamine
    Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet
    Antoine Augustin Cournot


10. What cofounder of the modern theory of games helped the U.S. military develop atomic and hydrogen bombs, only to die of brain cancer a few years later in 1957?
    Robert Oppenheimer
    Kurt Gödel
    John Von Neumann
    Oskar Morgenstern


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