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The Death of a Mathematician

Crafted by Trivia Architect kevinatilusa

Fun Trivia : Quizzes : Scientists & Inventors : The Death of a Mathematician

Introduction:
"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."


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?
    Rene Descartes
    Pierre Fermat
    Blaise Pascal
    Georg Cantor


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?
    Neils Abel
    Evariste Galois
    Pierre Fermat
    Joseph Louis-Lagrange


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


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?
    Pythagoras
    Diophantus
    Archimedes
    Euclid


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


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)?
    Ramanujan Srinivasin
    Alfred North Whitehead
    G. H. Hardy
    Bertrand Russel


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?
    Alan Turing
    Charles Babbage
    John Von Neumann
    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?
    Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet
    Antoine Augustin Cournot
    Charles Marie de La Condamine
    Louis Couturat


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?
    John Von Neumann
    Oskar Morgenstern
    Kurt Gödel
    Robert Oppenheimer


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