Scientific "Fathers" Trivia Quiz

Answer: Charles Babbage

The cowcatcher, dynamometer, standard railroad gauge, uniform postal rates, occulting lights for lighthouses, Greenwich time signals, heliograph ophthalmoscope are some of Babbage's other inventions. He also has a crater in the northern hemisphere of the moon named after him.

Answer: Diophantus

Diophantus, of Alexandria, is best known for his "Arithmetica," a work on the solution of algebraic equations and on the theory of numbers. He was born circa 200 and died around 284 AD.

Answer: al-Khwarizmi

al-Khwarizmi, 780-850, was born in Bagdad. His colleagues and he, called The Banu Musa, were scholars that worked on translation of Greek scientific manuscripts and they also studied, and wrote on, algebra, geometry and astronomy. The algebraic treatise Hisab al-jabr w'al-muqabala was the most famous and important of all of al-Khwarizmi's works.

It is the title of this text that gives us the word "algebra."

Answer: Euclid

Euclid, Greek mathematician and philosopher, was born in Alexandria around 325 BC. Very little is known of Euclid's life, other than that he came after the first pupils of Plato and was under the reign of Ptolemy I. His 13 books, collectively entitled "The Elements," were his most famous works.

In the books, the theorems and constructions of plane geometry and solid geometry, along with the theory of proportions, incommensurables and commensurable, number theory, and a type of geometrical algebra are discussed. All the Greek geometry knowledge was comprised, comprehensively into these 13 books.

Answer: Antoine Lavoisier

Antoine Lavoisier was born in Paris on August 26th 1743. His theories were all put together in this book: 'Traité ...lementaire de Chimie'. His work gave rise to fundamentals of quantitative organic analysis. Also, he laid the fundamentals for modern thermodynamics.

Answer: Theophrastus

Theophrastus lived from 371-286 BC in Athens, Greece. He inherited Aristotle's library and unpublished work, and he continued to study them. He is the author of these two remaining books. 'De historia plantarum' (A History of Plants) and 'De causis plantarum' (About the Reasons of Vegetable Growth).

Answer: Aristotle

Aristotle, 384-322 B.C., was a Greek philosopher and he taught in Athens as head of the Lyceum ,or Peripatetic school, from 335-323 B.C. Aristotle's works include writings on poetics, physics and metaphysics. He also wrote on logic, natural science, and ethics.

He is considered one of greatest overall thinkers in history. Aristotle may even be the most renowned mind to ever come out of Alexandria, which is really saying something.

Answer: Hipparchus

Hipparchus, 190-120 BC, is also known for comparing observations of a solar eclipse in Syene and in Alexandria to determine the distance from the Earth to the Moon. 'Commentary on Aratus and Eudoxus' is Hipparchus's only surviving writing, but it was not one of his major works. Most of what is known about Hipparchus was obtained from Ptolemy's writing 'The Almagest'.

In addition, Hipparchus spent most of his life in Rhodes, although he did visit Alexandria toward the middle of his career (this was most likely a long visit due to transportation).

Answer: Gregor Mendel

Gregor Mendel, 1822-1884, was the first man to postulate the theories of genetic heredity. He wrote his work in a short monograph entitled: 'Experiments with Plant Hybrids'. In this, he described how traits were inherited. Mendel derived certain basic laws of heredity: hereditary factors do not combine, but are passed intact; each member of the parental generation transmits only half of its hereditary factors to each offspring (with certain factors "dominant" over others); and different offspring of the same parents receive different sets of hereditary factors.

Answer: Carl Linnaeus

Linnaeus, born in 1707, was the founder of the binomial system of nomenclature. This is the classification of a plant or animal by its Genus (capitalized) followed by the species (lowercase). For example a polar bear's genus and species: Ursus maritimus. The binomial system highly simplified previous attempts.