2004

  1. Anup
  2. Dinesh Quiz 1
  3. Dinesh Quiz 2
  4. Dinesh Quiz 3
  5. Raghu
  6. Sumedha
  7. Ranga Quiz 1
  8. Ranga Quiz 2

 

Quiz by Raghu Kainkaryam

To view the answers select the coloured line that you see. The text is of the same colour as the background

  1. Connect:
    Time
    Mountain
    ‘Fish on a little one-legged table
    man at table sitting on a 3-legged stool
    the cat gets the bones’
    ‘Sun shining on the daisies growing in a field’
    Fish
    Dark
    Teeth
    Egg
    Wind

    These are the answers to all the riddles in J.R.R.Tolkein's "The Hobbit" which went back and forth between Gollum and Bilbo.

  2. In the movie 2010 (Space Odyssey), a hospital nurse who is watching over Dave Bowman's mother throws down a magazine to go and check on her. The magazine cover is supposed to have photographs of the US President and the Russian president. Whose photos are actually there?

    Arthur C Clarke as the US president and Stanley Kubrick as the Russian president.

  3. The only known photograph of S.Ramanujan (the one which appears in his stamps too) is his passport photo which was lost for sometime, until a very famous Nobel-laureate scientist who as a boy was inspired by Ramanujan's achievements and was himself a profecient mathematician, got it by tracking down Ramanjuan's wife Janaki in a small house in Madras. He later arranged for a pension to be paid to Janaki.Name him. (He called this act "one of his greatest contributions to science")

    Subramanya "Chandra" Chandrasekhar

  4. Which fictional character has been in the running for the US Presidency every year since 1958 with the slogan “You could do worse and always have”?

    Alfred E Neuman , the face of MAD magazine

  5. “We now return our souls to the creator and as we stand on the edge of eternal darkness, let our chant fill the void, that others may know: In the land of the night, the Ship of the Sun is drawn by the ________ ________”
    These lines from the Egyptian 'Book of the Dead' gave the name to which great rock band ?

    Grateful Dead

  6. The father of cybernetics and inventor of rigorous mathematics of Brownian Motion. A Jew who went to MIT due to Harvard's anti-semitism, worked on the application of math and engineering to communications and control problems. eccentric to the core--- with a beard like the 'Ancient Mariner', puffing on fat cigars, waddled like a duck and was a myopic parody of an absent-minded professor. His extraordinary upbringing at the hands of his father Leo led to 2 popular books "I am a Genius" and "I am a Mathematician".Name him.

    Norbert Wiener

  7. Often referred to as the "Pride and Sorrow of Chess", this guy from New Orleans took the world by storm (as a teen) with his play which was so far advanced for the 1850's that people thought that he had discovered some mathematical winning formula to chess. Bobby Fischer considered himself a rebirth of this guy. At his peak he just gave up chess and took up a career in law. (he cleared the bar exam at 18 and was thus underage to practice law in the state of Louisiana. He used this time to challenge all the masters of Europe and ended up humiliating them.) Who was this Chess supermaster, considered the "1st chess genius" ??

    Paul Morphy

  8. I had given a talk at the Royal Geographical Society in aid of the Environmental Investigation Agency's work on rhino conservation. Both Dave and Nick (hint : psychedelic musicians) came along and we all went out to dinner afterwards. Dave was a bit preoccupied about the title problem - they had to have the title by the following morning, and no-one could decide what it should be. I said, 'OK, I'll give you a title, but it'll cost you a £5,000 contribution to the EIA.' Dave said, 'well, tell me your title and we'll see'. So I suggested __________. And Dave said, 'hmmm, well, seems to work. Sort of fits the cover art as well. Yeah, OK'. Who is the speaker and what was the title he suggested ?

    Douglas Adams is the guy and the title was for Pink Floyd's album 'Division Bell'.

  9. Connect the town with the leaves below it.

    The song "Scarborough Fair" by Simon & Garfunkel.
    The town in the picture is Scarborough and the leaves are 'Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme'.

  10. "The wind is mild
    The sun is warm
    The water is clear
    The vegetation, lush.”
    Is an ancient and very popular poem that was created to describe the ideal landscape for a site: as time passed people began to abbreviate it, so that when referring to the poem and richness of it's meaning they called it simply "wind-water" . Which words origins are these ? (the original language is, of course, not english)

    Feng Shui

  11. Born in West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1758. He graduated from Yale in 1778 and admitted to the Bar in 1781. Thereafter, he began to practice law in Hartford before turning to teaching. In response to the need for truly American textbooks, he published The American Spelling Book, which was so popular it sold more than 80 million copies. In 1807, he began his greatest work, which was finally published in 2 volumes in 1828. He was the first author to gain a copyright protection in the US for his American Speller. Who?

    Noah Webster, of “Webster’s Dictionary” fame.

  12. After reading his previous fictional book of this author, the King of England asked this person for an advance copy of his next book but fumed when he received it as it was 'An Elementary Treatise on Determinants'. This famous author was actually a mathematician who to avoid confusion btw his maths & other books adopted a pen-name by turning his first two names into latin then back into English. Name him.

    Lewis Carrol (of "Alice in .."-fame)... his real name was Charles Ludwig Dodgson

  13. He had extremely successful careers as -- mathematician, physicist, economist, weapons expert and computer visionary. His aggressive nuclear views made him a model for Dr.Strangelove in Stanly Kubrick's 1963 film. Born in Budapest in a family of Jewish Bankers, his achievements include--- axiomatisation of set theory, proof of ergodic theorem, invention of 'continuous geometry', theory of parlor games, maths for the new Quantum Physics and the path-breaking "The Theory of Games and Economic Beaviour" with Oskar Morgenstern, this apart from his revolutionary work in the Manhatten project and stored program computers. Identify this multi-faceted genius.

    John von Neumann

  14. What is this ?

    International Prototype of the kilogram kept in Paris

  15. Which word in English (popular slang) originates from this advertisment ( that is, the manufacturer's name) ?

    Crap from Thomas Crapper & Co.