Challenge Accepted! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Archimedes

Hiero II, king of Syracuse, commissioned a gold crown for a temple, as an offering to the gods. When he became suspicious of the goldsmith's actions, he challenged Archimedes to find a way to verify the purity of the crown without damaging it: after all, you wouldn't want to damage an authentic crown.

Archimedes had a flash of inspiration while taking a bath. He noticed water spilling over the top when he got in, and this suggested the principle of density or buoyancy to him. He became so excited that he ran through the streets naked, shouting "Eureka!," and this is what he is most notorious for today. The crown was found to be debased, and the goldsmith dealt with accordingly.

Answer: Carl Gauss

This problem was supposed to give children practice with addition, but why take hours when all you need is seconds? Instead of just adding all the numbers together, Carl Gauss noticed a pattern, taking numbers from opposite ends of the given series: 1 + 100 = 101, 2 + 99 = 101, and so forth until 50 + 51 = 101. Because there are fifty pairs of 101s, the sum of them all is 5,050. This problem is commonly used today to teach children the importance of looking for patterns.

Carl Gauss decided to become a mathematician and later, an astronomy professor. He took on numerous challenges that stumped people at the time, such as rediscovering the planetoid Ceres after it had been discovered but lost. Gauss is considered to be one of (if not the) greatest mathematicians of all time, and made prolific contributions to physics and astronomy as well.

Answer: Gordian Knot

An old legend states that the ancient city of Gordium (near modern-day Ankara, Turkey) was once without a king. An oracle had predicted that their king would come riding in a wagon, and as it happened a peasant named Gordius came to the city in an oxcart. Gordius became king, and dedicated his cart to Zeus. He tied it with an intricate knot, and a prophecy arose that whoever undid the knot would conquer the world.

Some time later, Alexander the Great chanced upon Gordium and the knot. After failing to undo the knot by regular convention, he simply took his sword and cut it, thus 'undoing' it. Alexander is said to have gone on to conquer the world (though in actuality, he only got to India, and there was clearly much land beyond India that he never set foot in).

Answer: Jean-François Champollion

Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphics until about 400 AD, at which point it was replaced with a Latin-hieroglyph combination called Coptic, in part due to Christian influence. As early as the 9th century, Arabs attempted to decipher the old hieroglyphics by comparing the script to Coptic.

The famous Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799, with an inscription written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Demotic, and Ancient Greek. The Greek inscription was deciphered by 1803. In 1814, Thomas Young made some headway into translating the Demotic and Ancient Egyptian by realizing that proper names were enclosed in cartouches, and was the first to suspect that hieroglyphics included an alphabetic element, but otherwise had little success in translating them.

Jean-François Champollion was an expert linguist and nine years old when the Rosetta Stone was discovered. As a teenager, he had learned Coptic as well as numerous other languages. Starting with a sun-like symbol, which he reasoned must be pronounced "ra" (as the sun god Ra), Champollion used logic and his knowledge of Coptic to decipher most of the hieroglyphic language, publishing his results in 1822.

Answer: canning

Nicolas Appert was a confectioner who experimented with ways to preserve food. Although he had no way of knowing why, he noticed that cooking food in a sealed jar tended to preserve the food for much longer than usual. He perfected the first canning process in 1809, and was awarded 12,000 francs for his efforts. At the time, 12,000 francs was the equivalent of 112 ounces of gold or 1,735 ounces of silver.

Canning was eventually advanced further with the use of metal cans instead of glass. Can openers were invented years later. The reasons behind preserving properties of canning were better understood decades later, after Louis Pasteur introduced us to germ theory.

Answer: mostly deciphered by the end of the war, with other successes thereafter

Enigma was not a single machine, but rather a class of machines and encryption technology. The effort to break the technology was not monolithic, and various successes were had by different parties.

The Polish government was able to break an enigma code as early as 1932, but the complexity of the system had increased dramatically by the time World War II started. During the war, British forces attempted codebreaking from the famed Bletchley Park. The enigma system had a few cryptographic flaws, which led to some success in deciphering it. However, the system was generally too complicated for much progress with cryptography alone. Things like captured code books and repeated messages aided greatly in the decryption challenge, and by the end of the war, British and American forces were able to decipher most enigma-encrypted messages.

The numerous different enigma systems resulted in some messages remaining uncracked long after the war ended. Various individuals have taken up the challenge to break remaining messages. For example, a group called the M4 Project broke a U-boat message from 1942... in January 2013!

Answer: Isaac Newton

At a time when science was in its infancy, people started turning their attention to the heavens. Johannes Kepler had noticed a few things about the way the planets moved around the sun, but a theoretical proof had yet to be discovered. Isaac Newton knew that the orbits were elliptical, and claimed to have proof, but had misplaced it.

In order to try and essentially goad Newton into recalculating the proof, Wren offered a book worth 40 shillings to any person who could calculate the orbits of the planets within two months. Newton started reworking the solution, but did not have it done in time to claim the bet. Undeterred, Newton hammered away at the problem for a couple of years until he had recompleted the proof.

Newton did more than that though: he expanded his work and ended up publishing it three years later under the title "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica." In addition to Kepler's laws, the book included Newton's own laws of motion, laws of gravity. These laws formed the basis of the field of physics -- thanks in part to an unclaimed book worth 40 shillings.

Answer: Guinness World Records

In 1951, Hugh Beaver went on an unsuccessful hunting trip in Ireland. He was quite sure that his failure was because the golden plover was Europe's fastest game bird, though others challenged the assertion, claiming it was the grouse. After realizing that there was no easy way to verify the answer, he started a fact-gathering mission.

With the help of Norris and Ross McWhirter, he compiled a list of facts which he initially gave away. Beaver was the managing director of Guinness Breweries at the time, hence the name "Guinness Book of World Records" (later renamed to "Guinness World Records"). Shortly thereafter, the list was compiled into a book and became a popular hit: in fact, "Guinness World Records" lists itself in its own pages as the world's most sold copyrighted book.

Answer: Dr Seuss

Bennett Cerf was Dr Seuss's publisher, and in 1960 he felt like challenging Dr Seuss: write a book using fifty words or less. Dr Seuss took up the challenge, and using exactly fifty unique words created "Green Eggs and Ham".

"Green Eggs and Ham" is the story of a character who is challenged to try some bizarrely colored food. He declines repeatedly, but eventually gives in and enjoys it. It is Dr Seuss's best-selling book, and one of the best-selling children's books of all time. Shortly before his death in 1991, Dr Seuss claimed that Green Eggs and Ham was his only work that still made him laugh.

Answer: Jimmy Carter

The guinea worm is a parasite that requires human hosts. Although it is not fatal by itself, its slow emergence from a host causes open and painful sores. An afflicted person can be disabled for months, and develop dangerous infections as a consequence.

In 1982, former American president Jimmy Carter founded the Carter Center, dedicated to advancing human rights and fighting disease. The Carter Center took up the challenge of destroying the guinea worm as one of its health programs in 1986, at a time when there were 3.5 million cases worldwide. Today, guinea worm infections are incredibly rare, and mostly occur in South Sudan. Should efforts completely succeed, the guinea worm would be the second human disease in history to be completely eradicated.