Pioneers & Firsts
This woman is famous for her contributions to East Central High School. She teachers Algebra II Honors.
Who is Mrs. Soto?
Ada Lovelace wrote instructions for a computing machine invented by her friend Charles Babbage. What do we call those instructions today?
What is a computer program (or algorithm)?
Katherine Johnson calculated the path for this American astronaut to safely orbit the Earth in 1962. He refused to fly until she checked the math. (Hint: CAST)
Who is John Glenn?
Grace Hopper was a high-ranking officer in the U.S. military and also a computer scientist. Her rank was this (the same one as a one-star general):
What is Rear Admiral?
What do studies consistently show to be the most commonly thought of number when asked to pick a number from 1-10?
What is 7?
This woman is often called the first computer programmer. She lived in the 1800s and is the daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron.
Clue: Her last name is Lovelace.
Who is Ada Lovelace?
Florence Nightingale used charts and graphs to save lives. Today we call the study of collecting and analyzing numbers like this by this name.
What is statistics?
The 2016 movie Hidden Figures is about Black women mathematicians who worked here.
What is NASA?
Maryam Mirzakhani grew up dreaming of being a writer, but fell in love with math. She was born in this Middle Eastern country.
What is Iran?
This Greek philosopher is famous for his theorem about right triangles.
Who is Pythagoras?
She is known as "the mother of modern algebra". This German mathematician's first name starts with an E.
Clue: Her first name is the same as that of a famous award recognizing excellence in television.
Who is Emmy Noether?
This operation is the opposite of multiplication. Katherine Johnson used it constantly in her trajectory calculations.
What is division?
In the movie Hidden Figures, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson all worked at NASA's Langley Research Center, located in this U.S. state:
What is Virginia?
Katherine Johnson received this award from President Obama in 2015. It is the highest honor a U.S. civilian can receive.
What is the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
This number is the only number spelled with letters in alphabetical order.
What is Forty?
Best known for her contributions to hygiene and sanitation as a nurse during the Crimean War, this English social reformer was also a pioneering statistician who used data visualization.
Who is Florence Nightingale?
Sophie Germain worked on a famous math problem about whole numbers and exponents. It wasn't solved until 1995. It's called Fermat's _____ Theorem.
Clue: Not first, but...
What is Fermat's Last Theorem?
Before computers did the math, NASA hired real people to calculate numbers by hand. These people were called this:
What are human computers?
The Fields Medal is given every 4 years, just like this international sporting event.
What are the Olympics?
This 3D shape has exactly one vertex.
What is a cone?
This ancient mathematician from Alexandria, Egypt is one of the very first women in recorded math history. Her name sounds like a planet.
Who is Hypatia?
Grace Hopper helped invent early computers and found a real bug causing problems (literally). She found this type of insect inside a computer relay.
What is a moth?
This actress who played Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures is also known for her role as Cookie Lyon in popular 2015 TV series "Empire".
Who is Taraji P. Henson?
A building at NASA's Langley Research Center was renamed after this Hidden Figures mathematician in 2016.
Who is Katherine Johnson?
Maryam Mirzakhani competed in this international high school math competition twice, winning gold both times.
What is the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO)?