1

QUIZ: Get to know them

Prepared by-
Abhijit Kar Gupta
Email: kg.abhi@gmail.com

1. All of us know Benjamin Franklin. He became famous for being a scientist, an

inventor, a statesman, a printer, a philosopher, a musician, and an economist. He was
the man who is known to have performed the famous kite flying experiment. He was
the man who first thought of an ingenious method of measuring the thickness of a
thin film without any so-called instrument.

• Which country did he belong to?

2. ‘Conservation of Energy’ is a very fundamental law in Physics.

• Who proposed this first?

3. As we all know, Newton discovered Calculus. He published his work in 1667. A

famous Mathematician simultaneously developed the method of Calculus with a
different approach and published his work before Newton could get his publication.

• Who was that famous Mathematician?

4. He received Nobel Prize two times in Physics. In fact, he is the only person to
have got this award twice in the same subject!

• Who was that Physicist?

5. He was a Nobel Laureate in Physics; a celebrated scientist. He was also a goal

keeper of a first division football team in his country. His brother played for the
National team. His son is also a renowned Physicist.

• Who was that goal-keeper?

6. He used to play Esraj, a string instrument. He had an expertise in Hindustani Ragas.

He created some Ragas. He was fluent in more than six languages, translated some
Literature in French. Einstein translated his work in German.

• What was that Physicist?

7. He was an apprentice bookbinder; got a chance to work as an assistant with Humphry

Davy (known as a discoverer of safety lamp) in experimental Chemistry at Royal
Institution, London and spent his remainder of his working life there. He became one
of the greatest experimental Physicists of all time.

1
 2

• Who was that Scientist?

8. An extraordinary Physicist said, ‘I have no particular talent. I am extremely
inquisitive’.

• Who was that Physicist?

9. He was a genius who loved Numbers the way perhaps nobody could. He was in
his sickbed in a London hospital. A well-known Mathematician went to see him and
felt somewhat uneasy as how to start a discussion; he started with: ‘The number of my
taxi-cab was 1729. It seemed to me a rather dull number.” To which the sick man
replied, “No,…! No,…! It is a very interesting number. It is the smallest number
expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”

[Note: 10 3 + 9 3 = 1729 , 12 3 + 13 = 1729 ]

• Who was that Genius?

10. He was a famous French-born Mathematician. He lived all his life in England and
was an intimate friend of Newton. He died in 1754 at the age of 87 in curious
circumstances:
Shortly before his death, he declared one day that it was necessary for him to sleep
ten to fifteen minutes longer each day than the preceding one. This way he slept a
total of something over twenty-three hours and then he slept up to the limit of twenty-
four hours, and then died in his sleep.

• Who was that Mathematician?

Answers:
1. United States of America (USA)
2. Gottfried Leibniz
3. Gottfried Leibniz
4. John Bardeen
5. Neils Bohr
6. Satyendranath Bose
7. Michael Faraday
8. Albert Einstein
9. Srinivasa A. Ramanujan
10. Abraham de Moivre