Oh No, Mr. Bill! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Carl Friedrich Gauss

Gauss was known as a mathematical prodigy. While still a young schoolchild, he is reported to have worked out a shortcut to adding the numbers 1 to 100, a task set as a punishment that took him a matter of seconds. His shortcut involved considering the numbers in pairs (1 and 100, 2 and 99, etc) which had the same total, then just finding out how many of these simply-added pairs were needed. True or not, I am not the only teacher to use the story to introduce the formulas of arithmetic progressions to my high school classes. His contributions to number theory, statistics, analytical mathematics, electricity, and more fields are too numerous to list, let alone describe.

Coulomb's Law is another way of stating Gauss' Law of electric flux; Ampere's Law and Faraday's Law are the other two laws that Maxwell brought together with Gauss' Law for magnetism to produce his unifying set of electromagnetic equations.

Answer: Albania

The Albanian lek is divided into 100 qindarka, but the lek is the smallest coin currently in use. Bills are used with values of 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000 and 5000 lek. It has been suggested that the name 'lek' is derived from Alexander the Great, whose image was used on the first coins produced in 1926.

Pjeter Bogdani published the theological treatise "The Band of Prophets" (the usual shortened form of a very long title) in 1685. It is considered to be the first work written in, rather than translated into, Albanian. Before publication, he had translated it into Italian as required by the Church - not a lot of those charged with checking the theological validity of such a work in order to approve its publication were familiar with Albanian. The two versions were printed in parallel columns.

Answer: Moscow

Moscow, served by five airports of which Sheremetyevo International airport is the main one used by international civilian flights, is the capital of the Russian Federation, where the unit of currency is the ruble.

Yaroslav I the Wise (roughly 978 - 1054) was a son of Vladmir the Great, a Viking Grand Prince of Kiev. Coming out the winner of the bloody fraternal struggle for the succession, Yaroslav established the Kievan Rus as a formidable power, and established the written legal code called 'Russkaya Pravda' ('Justice of Rus'). His image also appears on the Ukranina hryvnia.

Answer: Shah of Iran

Best known in Western circles as the Shah of Iran, he also held the titles of Shah of Persia (Shah being equivalent to King), Shahanshah (King of Kings), Aryamehr (Light of the Aryans) and Bozorg Arteshtaran (Head of the Warriors). After the Islamic revolution of 1979, Pahlavi left the country and went to Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas and Mexico before entering the United States for medical treatment, a visit that is alleged to have been one of the triggers for the Iranian Hostage Crisis. After proceeding to Panama, he returned to Egypt for surgery, where he died in 1980, and is buried in the Al Rifa'i Mosque in Cairo.

Starting in 1986, the 1000 rial bill has featured the Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ruhollah Mostafavi Moosavi Khomeini.

Answer: Afghanistan

Mohammed Zahir's brother led a coup in Afghanistan when the shah was in Italy undergoing medical treatment. He remained in Italy until he was invited to return and become part of the process of establishing a new government for Afghanistan. There was some support for reinstating a monarchy, but the final decision was to set up a transitional government with Hamid Karzai as president. Zahir became a symbol of nonpartisan political unity, in recognition of the work he had done to modernize the state during his rule from 1933 to 1973.

Answer: Rupee

The rupee is the currency of a number of countries, including Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Indonesia. The Pakistani rupee is divided into 100 paise. Pakistani regulations governing currencies mean that you cannot see a sample here, but early in the 21st Century they all featured Muhammed Ali Jinnah, also known as Quaid-e-Azam (a title meaning Great Leader in Urdu) and Baba-e-Qaum (Father of the Nation). He was one of the leading figures in the fight to establish a separate Muslim state (separate from the Hindu-dominated state of India) at the end of British colonialism, after initially (in 1916) supporting a joint Hindu-Muslim state. He was Pakistan's first Governor-General from independence (August 15, 1947) until his death in 1948.

The rand is used in South Africa, the riyal in several countries including Saudi Arabia, and the ringgit in Malaysia.

Answer: Sukarno

Sukarno led the fight for independence from the Netherlands, which was declared in 1945, and acknowledged by the Netherlands in 1949. His image has been used on Indonesian bills in several series of notes - the 2000-2010 series shows him on the obverse or the 100,000Rp note, along with Mohammad Hatta, Indonesia's first vice president. These two are also honoured in the name of Jakarta's airport, the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, which uses the Dutch spelling of his name that he was forced to use in school, and with which he often signed his name as president, despite the fact that he preferred it to be Sukarno.

Sukarno's government was overthrown in 1965 in a coup that installed Major General Suharto in power, and led to Sukarno spending the last few years of his life under house arrest. His daughter, Megawati Sukarnoputri, became Indonesia's first female president, holding that position from 2001 until 2004.

Answer: Japan

Tomomi was born in 1825, the second son of Horikawa Tasuchika, but was adopted in 1836 by Iwakura Tomoyasu, from whom he took his family name. A strong opponent of the Tokugawa shogunate's policy of increased involvement with Western powers, he was one of those who led the drive to replace the shogunate with the oligarchy known as the Meiji government. This was a crucial step in the development of a unified Empire of Japan, and the move out of feudalism.

This series of notes, published between 1951 and 1953, hasn't been legal tender since 1971, but I was happy to add it to my collection.

Answer: Peso

If you looked closely at the photo, you should have seen that it is labeled as being worth 5000 pesos.

Jose Asuncion Silva (1865-1896) is considered one of the early writers in the form of Spanish-American Modernism. He wrote quite a lot of poetry, including his most famous poem, "Nocturno", an excerpt of which is featured on the reverse of this bill. In 1895 a ship carrying his only prose work sank; coming on top of the death of his sister Elvira in 1892, this loss was too much for him to bear, and he shot himself in the heart in 1896, dying at the age of 30.

Answer: Harriet Tubman

Potomacs are a local currency which can be purchased by residents of Washington and a few nearby areas, paying 95 cents for a dollar. They are accepted as currency by businesses that participate in the scheme to encourage sustainable local purchases.

Each bill includes an image of George Washington, along with a significant identity. Marvin Gaye, a singer-songwriter from Washington, D. C., is featured on the 1 Potomac note. The 5 Potomac note has an image of Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and suffragist who was born in Maryland and lived much of his life in Washington. Pierre L'Enfant, the French architect responsible for designing the city of Washington has his portrait on the 10 Potomac note. The 20 Potomac note includes a portrait of the renowned abolitionist Harriet Tubman, associated with helping slaves escape during the American Civil War using the Underground Railway. She was most definitely not a man.