Global Math Trivia

ProfessorCourse Title

Date

Valencia College (2014)

In what year was the first evidence of counting found?

A. 50,000 B.C.E.

B. 500 B.C.E.

C.500 C.E.

Valencia College (2014)

Which area of the world was the place value of numbers first used?

A. Europe

B. Asia

C.Mesopotamia

Valencia College (2014)

Which document gives most of our present day knowledge of Egyptian mathematics?

A. The Dead Sea Scrolls

B. The Rhind Papyrus

C.The Thebes Manuscript

Valencia College (2014)

Who first calculated the circumference of the Earth?

A. Isaac Newton

B. Archimedes

C.Eratosthenes

Valencia College (2014)

Who wrote a collection of 13 books devoted mostly to geometry and elementary number theory?

A. Plato

B. Euclid

C.Apollonius

Valencia College (2014)

Which ancient mathematician was famous for finding prime numbers using an elimination method?

A. Eratosthenes

B. Apollonius

C.Archimedes

Valencia College (2014)

Who developed early (infinitesimal) calculus, whose notation is still used in mathematics courses today?

A. Archimedes

B. Leibniz

C.Poincare

Valencia College (2014)

The destruction of which building led to the loss of much ancient knowledge?

A. The Parthenon in ancient Greece

B. The Coliseum of ancient Rome

C.The Library of Alexandria

Valencia College (2014)

The sequence of numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. has a name contributable to which mathematician?

A. Diophantus

B. Fibonacci

C.Pascal

Valencia College (2014)

Who do we attribute the xy-coordinate system we use today?

A. Decartes

B. Fermat

C.Galileo

Valencia College (2014)

The equation has no integer solutions when is greater than 2. Who first proved this theorem?

A. Pierre de Fermat

B. Pythagoras

C.Andrew Wiles

Valencia College (2014)

Who proved that mathematical knowledge will never come to an end?

A. Kurt Gödel

B. Albert Einstein

C.David Hilbert

Valencia College (2014)

Who proved the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra that states that every non-constant single variable polynomial with complex coefficients has at least one complex root?

A. Gauss

B. Leibniz

C.Newton

Valencia College (2014)

What is the historical meaning of the word "algebra"?

A. Computation

B. Abstract thinking

C.Restoration/balancing

Valencia College (2014)

This ancient Greek mathematician invented his namesake screw and is famous for declaring eureka when he discovered buoyancy while sitting in a tub of water.

A. Thales

B. Archimedes

C.Plato

Valencia College (2014)

This German, born in 1777 is known for his method of solving matrix equations, summing the first 100 integers quickly as a young child, and is referred to as the Prince of Mathematics.

A. Albert Einstein

B. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

C.Carl Friedrich Gauss

Valencia College (2014)

This Hungarian born man, one of the most prolific mathematical publishers of all time, was the subject of the movie N is a Number: A Portrait of ‘him’ and a book The Man Who Loved Only Numbers.

A. David Hilbert

B. Paul Erdős

C.George Pólya

Valencia College (2014)

This man born around 570 BC on the island of Samos is known for possibly being a vegetarian and founding an order focused on philosophy and mathematics. He is most well known for an identity that relates the sum of the squares of the lengths of the legs of a right triangle to it's hypotenuse, his namesake theorem.

A. Heraclitus

B. Anaxamander

C.Pythagoras

Valencia College (2014)