Quick Maths
The maximal number of colors needed to color a map added to the smallest perfect number.
What is 10?
(4 + 6)
These two giants had a hard time determining who first invented calculus.
Who are Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz?
Something so simple or direct that it's a chore to write down.
What is "trivial"?
The Clay Mathematics Institute offers one million dollars for a solution to this, perhaps computer science's most famous open problem.
What is P vs. NP?
Circles, ellipses, parabolas, but not squares.
What is a conic section?
The number of edges in the K5 graph multiplied by the most likely result of rolling two 6-sided dices.
What is 70?
(10 x 7)
Legend has it that Hippasus was drowned by his Pythagorean colleagues for having discovered these.
What are irrational numbers?
This quality may not be found in a freshman's attempt at a proof, but hopefully in a graduate student's thesis.
What is "rigour"?
David Hilbert put forth this many problems at the International Congress of Mathematicians in the year 1900. Some still remain unsolved.
What is 23?
Hilbert spaces, square-integrable functions, but not the empty set.
What is a vector space?
(Inner product space also accepted.)
The number of strictly positive multiples of 7 less than 120, from which we remove the number of even primes.
What is 16?
(17 - 1)
This German mathematician's thoughts on sets and infinity was quite controversial in their time, but are generally accepted these days.
Who is Georg Cantor?
When a mathematician is forced to make a choice which does not really matter in the end.
What is "without loss of generality"?
The Riemann Hypothesis states that all zeros of the Riemann zeta function are at negative even integers, or complex numbers with this real part.
What is one half.
Fields and rings, but maybe not magmas.
What is a group?
The positive square root of (one plus the surface area of a cube of length 2).
What is 5?
(sqrt(1 + 24))
The only Millennium Prize Problem for which we have a solution shares this French mathematician name. They also did not see eye-to-eye with Bertrand Russel on the philosophy of Mathematics.
Who is Henri Poincaré?
We apply this adjective to an object which is not well behaved.
What is "pathological"?
This conjecture states that there are infinitely many pairs of primes of the form (p, p+2).
What is the twin prime conjecture?
Parabolas, since waves, polynomials, but not circles.
What are functions?
The latest iPhone model number divided by the number of chambers in the Canadian parliament.
What is 6?
(12 / 2)
Tartaglia and Cardano, two Italian mathematicians of the 16th century, had quite a feud that ended up being settled by general solutions to this problem.
What is finding the roots of a cubic polynomial?
A result that every expert knowns, but is credited to no-one in particular.
What is "folklore"?
This mathematician with many collaborators also had a reputation of offering many cash prizes for solutions to certain problems. Solving the Collatz conjecture, for example, would net you 500 dollars.
Who is Paul Erdos?
Constants, trigonometric functions, logarithms, but not infinite sums.
What is a closed-form expression?