| [Mathematical trivia quiz] [By Mark Wilson. No responsibility taken for silly questions, bogus answers, etc] Give the first names of the following mathematicians: Legendre, Laplace, Lagrange, Newton, Lie, Klein, Hilbert, Poincare, Leray, Kolmogorov, Faltings, Donaldson, Atiyah, Fibonacci, Leibniz, Chebyshev, Cauchy, Milnor, Napier, Fourier, Monge, d'Alembert, Riemann, Wedderburn, Hardy, Brouwer. 1. Who stated the Erlanger Programm in 1872, and what was its central idea? 2. Which mathematician was Emil Artin's son-in-law? 3. State the (generalized) Poincare conjecture. Who proved it in dimension 4? 4. Name the 1986 Fields' medallists. 5. Which famous American mathematician had artificial hands? 6. Who wrote 'Space, Time, Matter' ? 7. What was Gauss's famous motto? 8. The nephew of which founding member of Bourbaki is (in)famous for his publicity of fractals? 9. What is the name of the lobby at Gottingen containing the bust of Hilbert? 10. Whose name is usually attached to the Schubfachprinzip (pigeonhole principle)? 11. Which great American differential topologist died in 1989? 12. Who was the first director of MSRI, and who was his Ph.D supervisor? 13. Who looked like "a nearsighted washerwoman" ? 14. Which famous female mathematician was brutally murdered by a Christian sect? 15. What nationality was Fields, of medal fame? 16. In which century was the modern = sign adopted? 17. Which great Soviet mathematician of this century was blind and anti-Semitic? 18. Who wrote 'I am a Mathematician' ? 'I want to be a Mathematician' ? 19. Who invented the term cybernetics? 20. In which war was Sophus Lie arrested as a German spy? 21. Who "revolutionized topology while in a WW2 prisoner-of-war camp" ? 22. Who published 'General investigations into curved surfaces' in 1827? 23. Which proponent of rigour in analysis overlooked the concept of uniform convergence in his 1821 text? 24. What happened to Felix Klein which ended his career as a researcher in 1883? 25. Who first showed the correspondence between Boolean algebras and Boolean rings? 26. Who developed linear and multilinear algebra decades ahead of his time? 27. Who systematically developed the theory of group representations in the 1890's? 28. Who wrote 'The Sand Reckoner' ? 29. Which Indian mathematician died in 1987, having done much fundamental work on representations of semisimple Lie groups? 30. Which famous philosopher was born in Konigsberg 138 years before Hilbert? 31. Which Nazi activist, whose work relates to quasiconformal mapping, died in 1941 aged 28? 32. Who were the first 2 recipients of the Fields' medals, in 1936? 33. Which "prima donna of mathematics" referred to applied mathematics as 'Schmierol' (grease)? 34. Who tied for the French Academy prize in 1881, aged 17? 35. What was Poincare doing when he realized the connection between hyperbolic geometry and Fuchsian groups? 36. Name the first 6 mathematics professors of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. 37. Which future peer proved transcendence of pi in 1882? 38. Name the theorem: An everywhere-defined symmetric operator on a Hilbert space is self-adjoint. 39. Who first gave, in 1957, an explicit example of a PDE with smooth coefficients which has no (distributional) solution? 40. Hilbert's 5th problem asks whether every locally Euclidean group is a Lie group. In which year was it solved? 41. What did Paul Cohen do in 1963 to warrant the Fields' medal? 42. Who was the chief developer of the the representation theory of Banach algebras in the early 1940's? 43. Gerd Faltings got the Fields' medal for proving Mordell's conjecture. What was it? 44. Who showed that, for differential manifolds, diffeomorphism is a stricter classification than homeomorphism? 45. Which important concept of analysis was discovered by Seidel in 1847, having been missed by Abel and Cauchy among others? 46. What, according to Legendre, was "a monument more lasting than bronze" ? 47. Apart from his earlier work in differential topology, for what is Rene Thom famous? 48. What did Kruskal and Zabusky discover in 1965 when studying nonlinear D.E. by computer? 49. Which mathematician's collected works are by far the largest? 50. Who were the 'invariant trinity' of 19th century British mathematics? 51. Walter Feit and John Thompson proved Burnside's conjecture in 1963, the proof occupying an entire journal issue. What was the conjecture? 52. Who, in 1890, mapped the unit interval continuously onto the unit square, thereby demolishing the current definition of 'dimension'? 53. For work on which problem in celestial mechanics did Poincare win the prize of 2500 crowns offered by King Oscar II of Sweden in 1887? 54. Which early topologist created intuitionism? 55. Louis de Branges proved Bieberbach's conjecture in 1984. What was it, in words? 56. Who said "I see it but I do not believe it" after showing that euclidean 1-space and n-space have the same cardinality for all n? 57. Who is usually credited with discovering the famous V - E + F= 2 formula for polyhedra in the 17th century? 58. Who, in 1844, exhibited the first known transcendental number? 59. Both the brachistochrone and tautochrone problem had a certain well-known curve as their solution. What was it? 60. Which two mathematicans, who each lived to be over 90, proved the Prime Number Theorem in 1896? 61. The cousin of which famous mathematician was premier of France during WW I? 62. Which Swede developed a theory of integral equations in the late 1890's which was generalized by Hilbert and the Gottingen school during the next decade? 63. Who introduced the concept of metric space in his 1906 thesis? 64. Which Texas topologist wrote "Mathematics as a Cultural System"? 65. Who heard about Russell's paradox, which in effect scuttled his book on set theory, when the book was already in the press? 66. Who wrote "Algebraic Theory of fields" (in German) in 1910? 67. Which French analyst of the early 20th century had a gold nose? 68. Which Russian topologist drowned off Brittany in 1924 at the age of 26? 69. Which mathematician was a member of the 1908 Danish Olympic soccer team? 70. Which French mathematician got his name from the fact that he was found as a baby on the steps of the church of St Jean le Rond? 71. Which theorem of Gauss did he call his "Theorema Aurema" ? 72. The Lasker of Lasker-Noether is better known as world champion in which sport for 27 years? ANSWERS Adrien-Marie, Pierre-Simon, Joseph-Louis, Isaac, Marius Sophus, Christian Felix, David, Jules Henri, Jean, Andrei Nikolaievich, Gerd, Simon, Michael Francis, Leonardo Pisano, Gottfried Wilhelm, Pafnuti Lvovich, Augustin Louis, John, William, Gaspard, Jean-Baptiste Joseph, Jean le Rond, Georg Bernhard, Joseph Henry MacLagan, Godfrey Harold, L Egbertus Johannes? 1. Felix Klein; geometries should be studied via their automorphism groups. 2. John Tate. 3. A simply-connected n-manifold without boundary having the same homology groups as an n-sphere is homeomorphic to an n-sphere; Michael Freedman. 4. Gerd Faltings, Michael Freedman, Simon Donaldson. 5. Solomon Lefschetz. 6. Hermann Weyl. 7. Pauca sed matura (few but ripe). 8. Szolem Mandelbrojt. 9. Hilbertraum. 10. P.G.L. Dirichlet. 11. Hassler Whitney. 12. Irving Kaplansky; Saunders Mac Lane. 13. Emmy Noether. 14. Hypatia. 15. Canadian. 16. 16th. 17. Lev Pontryagin. 18. Norbert Wiener; Paul Halmos. 19. Norbert Wiener. 20. Franco-Prussian war of 1870. 21. Jean Leray. 22. Gauss. 23. Cauchy. 24. Nervous breakdown caused by competition with Poincare. 25. Marshall Stone. 26. Hermann Grassmann. 27. Georg Frobenius. 28. Archimedes. 29. Harish-Chandra. 30. Immanuel Kant. 31. Oswald Teichmuller. 32. Lars Ahlfors and Jesse Douglas. 33. Edmund Landau. 34. Hermann Minkowski. 35. Stepping onto a bus. 36. Einstein, Morse, Alexander, von Neumann, Weyl, Veblen. 37. Ferdinand Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell. 38. Hellinger-Toeplitz theorem. 39. Hans Lewy. 40. 1952 (by Gleason, Montgomery and Zippin). 41. He showed that the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis are independent of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. 42. I. M. Gelfand. 43. Every equation of genus at least 2 has only finitely many rational points. 44. John W. Milnor, in 1956. 45. Uniform convergence. 46. Abel's memoir on elliptic functions. 47. Being a proponent of catastrophe theory. 48. Solitons. 49. Euler. 50. Cayley, Sylvester and Salmon. 51. Every nonabelian simple group has even order. 52. Guiseppe Peano. 53. Stability of the solar system. 54. L.E.J. Brouwer. 55. The nth Taylor coefficient of a schlicht function has modulus at most n. 56. Georg Friedrich Cantor. 57. Rene Descartes (see Lakatos, 'Proofs and Refutations' for the convoluted history of this formula). 58. Joseph Liouville. 59. Cycloid. 60. Jacques Hadamard and Charles de la Vallee-Poussin. 61. Poincare. 62. Ivar Fredholm. 63. Maurice Frechet. 64. Raymond Wilder. 65. Gottlob Frege. 66. Ernst Steinitz. 67. Gaston Julia. 68. P. Urysohn. 69. Harald Bohr. 70. Jean le Rond d'Alembert. 71. The law of quadratic reciprocity. 72. Chess. Who are we quoting (often in translation)? 1. We must know. We shall know. 2. I turn away in fear and horror from this lamentable plague of functions having no derivatives. 3. Just go on, and faith will soon return. 4. A quantity which is diminished or increased by an infinitely small quantity is neither increased nor decreased. 5. The hypothesis of the acute angle is absolutely false, being repugnant to the nature of the straight line. 6. I fear the cries of the Boeotians... 7. The divine spirit found a sublime outlet in that wonder of analysis, that portent of the ideal world, that amphibian between being and not-being, which we call the imaginary root of negative unity. 8. God ever arithmetizes. 9. One must be able to say at all times, instead of points, lines and planes, tables, chairs and beer mugs. 10. God made the integers - all else is the work of man. 11. I was, for a time, the fifth best pure mathematician in the world. 1. David Hilbert. 2. Charles Hermite. 3. Jean le Rond d'Alembert. 4. Johann Bernoulli. 5. Girolamo Saccheri, being unable to derive a contradiction after dropping Euclid's parallel axiom (Euclid Freed of Every Flaw, 1733). 6. J.C.F. Gauss, on why he did not publicize his knowledge of the existence of noneuclidean geometries. 7. G.W. Leibniz (a lot of words to describe i). 8. Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. 9. David Hilbert, speaking of the axiomatic method in geometry. 10. Leopold Kronecker. 11. G.H. Hardy. | |
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