Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. Shortly after accepting an invitation by Queen Christina of Sweden to visit her country, this man died there due to the rigorous climate. He is known for his contributions to the field of philosophy as well as mathematics. Some call him the founder of analytical geometry, and in algebra he added knowledge to the treatment of negative roots. His coordinate system bears part of his name. Identify this mathematician who thought, and therefore he was.
2. This man was both a philosopher and a mathematician. He was employed as a diplomat by the elector of Mainz, who once sent him to persuade King Louis XIV to attack Egypt. His philosophical work had a major impact on Kant. After his death, a dispute arose as to whether he or Sir Isaac Newton was the true creator of calculus.
3. As an inventor, this man created war machines that staved off the invading Marcus Claudius Marcellus for three years from his native Syracuse. As a mathematician, he has a principle and a screw that bears his name, and contributed much to our knowledge of circles, cylinders, and other geometric shapes. He is also the subject of the well-known story in which he was seen running through the streets naked after a discovering the composition of a crown in his bathtub.
4. After getting a fever on a trip that was supposed to restore his health, this man died. His last words were: "Men die but their works endure," which is an easy thing to say when you have written 789 full-length works. As a Catholic and a royalist he was often persecuted and disliked, and he was exiled for a number of years. This man developed the criteria for determining if an infinite series is convergent or divergent, and also helped unify calculus by defining continuity and derivative in terms of limit, and by providing one of the first good definitions of a limit.
5. Given the possibly intimidating nickname of "Analysis Incarnate" by his peers, this man was one of the most prolific mathematicians. Although his last words, "I die," would not seem to indicate so. He standardized modern mathematics notation, and was the first person to represent trigonometric values as ratios. He also proved that the number "e", which is named for him, is irrational.
6. This Frenchman was not one of the most prolific mathematicans. Indeed, he published almost nothing during his lifetime. His amazing feats of genius were only discovered from his notes and on the margins of his pages. He came up with many theorems, but did not always leave rigorous proofs of those theorems. He also proposed many questions that left the vast majority of mathematicans baffled. He is perhaps best known for his last theorem.
7. This man spent much of his time working with telescopes. He fashioned an improved way for grinding lenses. His Horologium Oscillatorium dealt with pendulum clocks.
8. This man helped spread the good word of infinitesimal calculus. One of the first students of Bernoulli, a rule in calculus bears his name.
9. This man discovered the normal distribution, which approximates the binomial distribution. The theorem named for him is a formula which obtains powers and roots of complex numbers.
10. One of the pioneers of modern computers, this man developed an "analytical engine" to perform various computations. He also developed a "difference engine" for calculations involving logarithms.
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