Math Trivia
What shape is found across natures because it has the lowest perimeter to area ratio out of all shapes that can form a tessellation?
Hexagon
How many winning 3-in-a-rows are there on a 3d tic-tac-toe board?
49
Which of the following is St Valentine not the patron saint of?
Beekeepers, Epileptics, Breweries, Happy marriages
He was not the patron saint of breweries
How long ago did the dodo go extinct?
(336-)364 years ago
What theorem is named after a mathematician who, in elementary school, this theorem’s namesake summed the numbers 1 through 100 in a matter of seconds using a trick they found, shocking their teacher, and states that the flux of a vector field through a closed surface equals the divergence enclosed by the surface?
Gauss’s theorem
What is representation of a function as a polynomial with infinite terms?
A Taylor series or Maclaurin Series
How many types of regular polygon can tessellate the plane (tile a plane with no gaps or overlap)?
3 (triangles, squares, hexagons)
Who is the mother of Cupid in Greek mythology?
Aphrodite
What percent of species went extinct in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, the event that killed the dinosaurs?
75%
What theorem is named after a mathematician who got in a feud with Descartes, after claiming his laws of refraction were incorrect, and states that for any prime number p and and positive integer n, p is a factor of n^p-n?
Fermat’s little theorem
What is the probability of obtaining test results at least as extreme as the observed result, assuming the null hypothesis? If the probability is less than 0.05, many fields of study reject the null hypothesis?
p-value
How many 5 card poker hands contain a 4 of a kind (order does not matter)?
624 (13 ranks for the 4, times 48 remaining cards for the other one)
Which English king declared Valentine’s Day a holiday in 1537?
King Henry VIII
How long ago did the Asylosaurus (A Triassic era dinosaur) go extinct?
201.3 million years ago
Famous for their meditations, and their statement, "Cogito, ergo sum", the namesake of this theorem was a philosopher, scientist and mathematician. What theorem states ‘for any 4 mutually tangent circles, the sum of the bends of the circles squared is twice the squares of the bends summed’?
Descarte’s theorem
Given how many non-collinear points on a plane, can you always find a unique conic section passing through all of them?
5 points
In a group of 100, each a Borg or a Corg, every Borg has 2 Corg friends and no Corg has more than 1 Borg friend. If exactly 13 Corgs have no Borg friends, then how many Corgs are in the group?
71
During which century did Valentine’s Day start to be associated with romance and love?
The 14th century
How long ago did the Velocoraptor go extinct?
(71-)75 million years ago
What theorem is named after a mathematician who lectured at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in a class that was under Hilbert’s name, while he tried to get them on the University faculty, and states that for every conserved quantity in the universe, there is a symmetry?
Noether’s theorem
Zermelo’s theorem states that a 2-player zero sum game will have a definite winner assuming both players play perfectly if the game is: turn based, open information, no chance, no ties, and what other condition?
The game ends in a finite number of turns
I am a 3 digit prime number. The sum of my first two digits equals my third, and the sum of my last 2 digits is 11. What number am I?
347
In which U.S. city did the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre happen on Feb. 14, 1929?
Chicago
When were bald eagles removed from the endangered species list?
1995
What theorem is named after a mathematician who watched their friend get killed in the French Revolution, and states that the size of every subgroup of a group divides the size of the group?
Lagrange’s theorem