Math History
Calculus
Fun Facts
Higher Math (beyond Calc)
Mystery
100
The inventor of calculus
Who is Isaac Newton
OR
Who is Gottfried Leibniz
100
Name three fields in which calculus is used
Economics, biology, computer graphics, engineering, medicine, architecture, statistics, etc.
100
The proper name for 1/100th of a second.
What is a jiffy?/a jiffy
100
Name two methods for proving a theorem (think broad)
Induction, direct, contrapositive, contradiction
100
A famous sequence that shows up in nature
What is the Fibonacci Sequence?
0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,…
200
Archimedes’ estimation of the value of the pi.
22/7
Or somewhere between 22/7 and 223/71
200
Calculus is “the study of _______” (one word answer)
Change
200
The only number spelled (in English) with the same number of letters as the number itself.
What is four?
Four
200
Two people who made important discoveries in analysis
Newton, Cauchy, Fourier, Hilbert, Halmos
200
A book about shapes living in a 2D plane where the shapes don’t believe in 3D
Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott
300
Who came up with the formula for adding numbers 1 to n?
N(n+1)/2
Carl Friedrich Gauss
300
L’hopital’s rule
300
The only number that is equal to the sum of its divisor, excluding itself
What is 12?/12
300
Euler’s formula
e^in = cos(n) + isin(n)
(Or some form of that)
300
Two countries where zero or the idea of zero was present in ancient-ish history
India, Sumeria/Babylon area, the Mayans
Later China, Middle East
400
The time and place where the symbol for infinity was first used
Greece, 5th century BC
400
The integral of an odd function over a symmetric interval
0
400
The number of people you have to have in a room for there to be a 50% chance that two people have the same birthday.
23 people
400
A group generated by a single element (where to obtain the group, you take all the powers of that element)
What is a cyclic group?
400
The person who started the tradition of using x,y, and z for unknown quantities
Rene Descartes
In his book La Geometrie, he used these letters, possibly because the printer had lots of extras of those letters
500
The first female mathematician whose life and work are well-documented (or the time or place where or when she lived)
Hypatia
4th century bc (355-415)
Alexandria, Egypt
500
∫xtan^2(x)dx
Substitute for sec^2(x) - 1
=xtan(x) + lnlcos(x)l - x^2/2 + C
500
The shape of a baseball diamond (hint: not a diamond)
A perfect rhombus (a parallelogram with opposite equal acute angles, opposite equal obtuse angles and four equal sides)
500
Fermat’s last theorem
There are no three positive integers a,b, and c that satisfy the equation a^n+b^n=c^n for any integer value of n greater than 2.
500
Why a circle has 360 degrees
Babylonians - maybe because of the length of the year
Or because they had a base 60 system