Friday, December 08, 2006

Answers and Grades Posted Here

Quiz repeated in comments section
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8 comments:

Arelcao Akleos said...

said...
"Aaron done, Who Next?"
5 Comments -Show Original Post Collapse 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

12/08/2006 10:41 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...

Answers:
[1] A [he had in mind those who dabbled in astrology]
[2] D [are we surprised?]
[3] F [folks, he was a proud Ricain ]
[4] B [ Remember he was Sherlock Holmes' nemesis, the antilogical mathematicus]
[5] F [JJ had he taken the quiz no doublt would have known this one?]
[6] E [AI led the way on this one]
[7] C [A Beau Jest]
[8] B [It is the start of her most famous poem, which goes:

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

[9] For these, I'll explain any you ask me to.
[a] F
[b] T
[c] F
[d] F
[e] T
[f] F
[g] F
[h] F
[i] T
[j] F

[10] C [ I knew this one would fool ya's!]
[11] A [no not obvious. But then neither are BCS bowls]
[12] A

12/08/2006 10:56 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...

Grades: I had promised a "P" for pass to anyone who attempted the quiz, and I am a man of my word.
So AI, PLP, MFT all get Pass.
JJ, who found he could run and hide, gets a glorious NP [ Not Pass].

Oh, you want percentages? ok, wait a bit.

12/08/2006 10:58 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...

Extra credit was built into the grading. Each question except for 9 was worth 8 points. And each part of 9 was worth 3. So maximum, possible, out of 100, was 118 [go figure]. Here are scores.
JJ. 0%
AI 24%
MFT 23%
PLP 11%.

Had this been an exam in first year honor physics at Chicago, these percentages would have translated into
JJ F, AI B+, MFT B+, PLP C.

But I'm an easy grader, which is why I am in exile far from Chicago.

12/08/2006 11:07 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...

AA, you and I would be able to grade the Physics for Poets classes at Harvard though. And don't forget to curve it real good for the students who have real rich alumni parents.

12/09/2006 8:26 AM
Arelcao Akleos said...

Little Billy Gates Jr? A+++++++++++!!!!!.
Yup, I could do it.

12/09/2006 11:13 AM
My Frontier Thesis said...

Little Billy Gates Jr? A+++++++++++!!!!!.

Do you think Bill Gates Sr. would bite? I heard he's gonna give all his money away before or just after he dies so his kids don't become slackers — kind of the Andrew Carnegie I-Feel-Bad-For-Raping-Everyone ethos.

12/09/2006 12:45 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...

B y the time he dies, I figure his kids slakingness is carved on the Gates

12/11/2006 10:29 AM

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