Monday, December 04, 2006

Aaron done, Who Next?

Try the quiz, please, which repasted into the Comments
Posted by at

5 comments:

Arelcao Akleos said...

mpromptu Quiz on a Connected Theme. No Cheating!
[1] Which of the following were explicitly condemned by Saint Augustine

[a] Mathematicians
[b] Whores
[c] Followers of "The Cult of Makkah"
[d] The Oracle of Delphi
[e] Manicheans
[f] All of the above

[2] The [obviously inadequate] bodyguard of Leon Trotsky was a PhD in what field?

[a] Physics
[b] Philosophy
[c] Economics
[d] Mathematics
[e] History
[f] More than one of the above

[3] Benjamin Franklin carried out research in which of the following?

[a] Mathematics
[b] Electrostatics
[c] Agriculture
[d] French Pudenda
[e] Exactly two of the above
[f] All of the above

[4] Which of the following was a PhD in Mathematics?

[a] Prime Minister Poincare'
[b] Dr. Moriarty
[c] Prime Minister Rao
[d] President Garfield
[e] Exactly two of the above
[d] None of the above.

[5] The name of the one starting NFL quarterback to have a PhD in Mathematics was?

[a] Ignatius Reilly [New Orleans Saints, Tulane University ( on Proper Geometries)]
[b] Karl Franz [Detroit Lions, University of Illinois (on the Bifurcation in Turbulent Flow Through Manifolds)]
[c] Pete Domich [Tampa Bay Buccaneers, RPI, "New Genetic Algorithms in Mice Domains]
[d] Michael Kato [San Francisco 49ers, Harvard University ( on "Inverse Scattering, Tremors, and Wavelets"]
[e] Al Gore [Tennessee Titans, MIT ( on "A Radical Conception of a Future Communication Worldwide Net" )
[f] Frank Ryan [ Cleveland Browns, Rice ( on "On Holomorphic Domains"]

[6] How many Nobel Prizes in Mathematics have been awarded to Frenchmen?

[a] 7
[b] 11
[c] 3
[d] 15
[e] 0
[f] 6

[7] Which of the following is a verifiable quote from Einstein

[a] Mathematics is the PLay of the Devil, Physics that of God.
[b] Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Eigenvalue
[c] There is no difficult mathematics, there are just stupid mathematicians
[d] I do not know how I seem to others, but to me it is as if I have been a boy at the seashore, picking at pebbles, while the great Ocean of Truth lay before me.
[e] Bah, that Mathematician, Minkowski, who would have believed him capable of it?
[f] The more I push this Tensor Analysis the tensor and tensor I become.

[8] Who said the following: "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare"

[a] Euclid's wife
[b] Edna St. Vincent Millay
[c] Francis Bacon
[d] Heloise, in the correspondence between Abelard & Heloise
[e] Thomas Hardy
[f] Isaac Newton

[9] [a] T or F: The Fourier Transform honors the work of Joseph Fourier, onetime French investigator of antiquities in Egypt, under Napoleon, for his work on Integral Transforms
[b] T or F: The most famous discovery of Pythagoras was the irrationality of the square root of two
[c] T or F: Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebniz were the near coeval discoverers of "The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus"
[d] T or F : Isaac Newton wrote [not published, wrote] more on the fields of mathematics and gravity and optics [together] than on any other subject.
[e] T or F: President Grant, when young, was given the choice between a military career or being sponsored to go to France to pursue a doctorate in mathematics.
[f] T or F: Indiana's state legislature once passed a bill declaring the value of "Pi" to be exactly 3.
[g] T or F: The movie "Pi" was about the brlliant daughter of a troubled mathematical genius, and her own fears of following her father into madness
[h] T or F: Stalin said: "One man dies it is a Tragedy, but a million die and it is mere Mathematics"
[i] T or F: Malcolm X wrote roughly : " I always hated Mathematics. It was clear, and unavoidable, and gave me no escape room"
[j] T or F : Malcolm X wrote roughly: "I always loved Mathematics. It was clear, and unavoidable, and no white man could ever take that from me".

[10] A "Curve of Double Curvature", a mainstay of mathematical research from 1730 to 1850, roughly, is today better known as?
[a] An Ellipse
[b] A Fractal
[c] A General Space Curve
[d] A Cycloid
[e] An Algebraic Curve
[f] The Mae West

[11] Precisely one of the following came in first in a Putnam Competition [the mainstay university mathematical competition in the USA. Note that, always, the mode is 0 and, often, the mean is under 5, out of 120. It is not so easy ]
[a] Keith Ramsey, Chicago, 1984-5
[b] Richard Feynman, MIT 1937-38
[c] Edward Witten, Brandeis 1969-70
[d] Norbert Wiener, Tufts 1916-17
[e] Richard Cohen, Chicago 1959-60
[f] John Nash, Carnegie Mellon 1948-49
[g] This is unfair! Who the hell can know? [answer, if you can know BCS bowl winners, you can know this]

[12] Just before and after WWII, there was an extraordinary flowering of mathematical talent in Hungary, most of which ended up emigrating to the Free West to escape the miseries of the Socialisms, Red and Brown. All of the following belonged to this diaspora except for?
[a] Ferencz Puskas
[b] Johnny Von Neumann
[c] Paul Erdos
[d] Turan
[e] Paul Halmos
[f] Erdelyi

12/04/2006 9:07 AM
Arelcao Akleos said...

My Frontier Thesis said...
Wow, this is going to be hilarious. Here we go:

1.) d
2.) d (although "b" is highly likely considering how the philosophers performed in the Monty Python skit I saw last week)
3.) b (although that little Franklin Stove might have implication elsewhere?)
4.) a (okay, either he developed a conjuncture, which I know nothing about, or there was never such a P.M; like I said, this is going to be hilarious).
5.) b
6.) c
7.) d
8.) f
9.)
10.)
11.) g
12.) b

I started losing it towards the last part. I think I felt more ridiculous taking this test than you felt in taking mine. I'm going back to what's understandable, or monty python.

12/04/2006 9:08 AM
Arelcao Akleos said...

Arelcao Akleos said...
Game effort, MFT. Danke! I'll let the other take a gander through tomorrow [presuming they answer it "cold" like you did, and not after some boning up]. Then post results on tuesday. Ummm, everybody gets a "P", as this is a seminar course, so no need to fret.

12/04/2006 9:09 AM
Tecumseh said...

Fun quiz. I don't have time to take it now, but can I do it in pieces? To start with, let me try some easy ones:

2: d. I was just reading about this a couple of days ago in Wikipedia or something.

6. e. There is no Nobel prize in Math. Perforce, no Frenchman got it.

12. a. Although Puskas was more Hungarian than Attila the Hun, he was not a mathematician, just kicked ball.

Am I on the right track?

12/04/2006 9:24 AM
Arelcao Akleos said...

Yes, AI, you are. but remember that JJ and Pepe have not taken it yet, so [excepting the three so far, of course] please don't explain your answers. They'll just use your work as a crib sheet!

12/04/2006 9:30 AM

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