Maths
This 17th-century French mathematician's "Last Theorem" regarding powers of integers went unproven for over 350 years until 1994.
Who is Pierre de Fermat?
This 11-letter rhetorical term describes the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses or sentences.
What is epistrophe?
Signed in 1648, this series of peace treaties effectively ended the Thirty Years' War and established the modern concept of state sovereignty.
What is the Peace of Westphalia?
This fundamental law of physics states that the total radiant heat energy emitted from a surface is proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature.
What is the Stefan-Boltzmann law?
Though famous for playing Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill voiced this iconic Batman villain continuously across video games, animation, and toys for over 30 years.
Who is the Joker?
In set theory, this Hebrew letter with a zero subscript denotes the cardinal number of the set of all integers, representing the smallest infinity.
What is Aleph? (Accept: "Aleph-zero", "Aleph-null", "Aleph-naught", and other variations)
Written entirely without the letter "E", Georges Perec’s 1969 French novel La Disparition is a famous example of this specific type of constrained writing.
What is a lipogram?
This short-lived 1871 radical socialist government ruled the capital of France for just over two months before being brutally suppressed during "Bloody Week."
What was the Paris Commune?
This is the only letter of the alphabet that does not appear anywhere on the periodic table of elements.
What is the letter J?
This 1999 sci-fi movie was the very first film to be commercially distributed digitally to theaters, paving the way for modern digital cinema.
What is Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace?
Named after a German mathematician, this non-orientable, one-sided topological surface has no distinct "inner" or "outer" sides and can only truly exist without self-intersection in four dimensions.
What is a Klein bottle?
This is the technical linguistic term for the "invisible" vowel sound inserted into a word to make it easier to pronounce, such as saying "athe-lete" instead of "athlete."
What is an epenthesis? (or anaptyxis)
This complex, 14th-century code of laws, instituted by a Serbian Emperor, standardized legal practices and social classes across the Balkans.
What is Dušan's Code? (or Code of Emperor Dušan)
In geology, this specific type of fine-grained, volcanic rock contains high amounts of silica and is the volcanic equivalent of granite.
What is rhyolite?
In the classic arcade game Pac-Man, the four ghosts have unique programming behaviors. This specific color ghost is programmed to actively target the tile exactly four spaces ahead of Pac-Man's current direction.
Who is Pinky? (pink ghost)
This fundamental mathematical constant, approximately equal to 1.618, is the positive root of the quadratic equation x² - x - 1 = 0.
What is the Golden Ratio? (or Phi)
In English grammar, this specific type of aspect indicates an action that began in the past, continues into the present, and uses a form of the auxiliary verb "to be" with a present participle.
What is the present perfect continuous tense? (e.g., "I have been running")
This ancient Mesopotamian city-state, ruled by Urukagina, is famous for producing the world's earliest known legal code aimed at protecting the poor from the wealthy.
What is Lagash?
This organic compound, with the chemical formula C₄H₄O, is a five-membered heterocyclic ring containing four carbon atoms and one oxygen atom.
What is furan?
This 1990s television show holds the record for the most Primetime Emmy nominations for a single season of a comedy series, securing 27 nominations in 1994.
What is Frasier?
Introduced in 1843 by William Rowan Hamilton, this non-commutative number system extends complex numbers into four dimensions and uses the fundamental formula i² = j² = k² = ijk = -1.
What are quaternions?
This Middle English poem from the late 14th century features a green-skinned knight who survives a decapitation and challenges a knight of King Arthur's Round Table.
What is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?
In 843 AD, the Treaty of Verdun divided the massive Carolingian Empire among the three surviving sons of this emperor.
Who is Louis the Pious?
This quantum mechanical rule states that for a given electron configuration, the lowest energy term is the one with the greatest value of total spin multiplicity.
What is Hund's rule of maximum multiplicity?
Before forming the legendary band Gorillaz, musician Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett co-created a fictional, short-lived, post-apocalyptic cartoon band in 1992 named after this specific animal.
What are The 10 O'Clock Post-Ice-Cream-Van Monkeys? (Accept: "The Monkeys")