This is the classic subject where I usually don’t understand the question. But that’s no reason not to try!
Questions
On a two-dimensional graph, if the abscissa is the distance from the Y-axis, what term is used for the distance from the X-axis?
ORDINATE
The incenter of a triangle is the point of intersection of what three lines, which are known by a two-word term that involves splitting a specific mathematical feature into two equal parts?
ANGLE BISECTORS
Intersecting at a point where the three perpendicular bisectors of a triangle’s side meet, which centre of a triangle sees a circle pass through all its vertices, or in my language, corners?
CIRCUMCENTER
Used to show how the lower a number is between 1 and 9, the more likely it is to found at the beginning of a number, what are either of the other commonly used names for Benford’s Law?
FIRST DIGIT LAW / LAW OF ANOMALOUS NUMBERS
Being attributed to David Hilbert, what letter of the alphabet is used to represent integers? N is used for natural numbers, Q for rational numbers and R for real numbers.
Z
A 17th-century figure who made contributions in the field of calculus prior to Isaac Newton, who introduced the mathematical symbol for infinity and used 1 / infinity to represent the concept of the infinitesimal?
JOHN WALLIS
His diverse body of work including books on magic and “The Annotated Alice”, which contained a lot of extra detail around Lewis Carroll’s two most famous novels, who popularised Piet Hein’s Soma Cube in a 1958 “Mathematical Games” column, a feature of “Scientfic American” magazine?
MARTIN GARDNER
A contraction of the Danish words for ‘laugh’ and ‘sigh’, what were the short aphoristic poems by Piet Hein that were published in the daily newspaper “Politiken” during Nazi occupation of his country?
GRUKS / GROOKS
A superellipse is also known as a curve named for which French mathematician who died in 1870, his name being one of the 72 inscribed on the Eiffel Tower?
GABRIEL LAMÉ
Getting its name from the look of a graph that was produced as a result of investigations into how electrons behave in a magnetic field, what creature gives its name to a fractal that was introduced by Douglas Hofstadter?
BUTTERFLY (Hofstadter’s Butterfly)
An anagram of its predecessor “Mathematical Games”, what’s the name of the “Scientic American” column written by Douglas Hofstadter that followed the one by Martin Gardner?
METAMAGICAL THEMAS
Used to calculate what day of the week is associated with any date, which John Conway algorithm uses anchor days and a couple of additional steps to permit a mental calculation?
DOOMSDAY (RULE)
Sharing its title with the surname of the Groucho Marx character in “A Day at the Races”, which game by John Conway sees players taking it in turns to cut branches of a tree until one of them can no longer move?
HACKENBUSH
Used for determining electrical conductivity under the Earth’s surface, MT is an abbreviation for what technique? Commercial uses include hydrocarbon exploration, with it having been introduced independently by different figures, including Russian geophysicist Andrey Tikhonov.
MAGNETOTELLURICS
With which German-born Israeli mathematician does Ernst Zermelo share an axiomatic set theory that was formulated to be free of paradoxes? This system creates a foundation on which other mathematicial concepts can be built.
ABRAHAM FRAENKEL
Not to be confused with a concept that has the same name in game theory, the Zermelo’s theorem that relates to sets is also known as what? The ‘Axiom of Choice’ was introduced to prove this theorem.
WELL-ORDERING THEOREM
An equality that sees e^(i x pi) + 1 = 0, which equation is said to prove that pi is a transcendental number? Richard Feynman called it “the most remarkable formula in mathematics”.
EULER’S IDENTITY
Because pi is transcendental, it implies the impossibility of doing what, this challenge coming up in novels such as “Ulysses” and “The Magic Mountain”, as well as song in “Princess Ida”?
SQUARING THE CIRCLE
Named for a Danish mathematician who was an important figure in the development of graph theory, what shape does the outside of a Petersen graph take?
PENTAGON
It being depicted as a pentagon with a pentagram inside, how many vertices or nodes does a Petersen graph have?
TEN
Mapping the paths between its ten vertices, how many edges does a Petersen graph have?
FIFTEEN
Originating in the work of French Fields Medal winner René Thom, catastrophe theory is a branch of which other theory, where a small change made in a parameter value causes a sudden change in its behaviour?
BIFURCATION THEORY
The term ‘bifurcation’ was first introduced by which Nancy-born mathematician in an 1885 paper?
HENRI POINCARÉ
German mathematician Johann Benedict Listing introduced what term in an article published in 1847, this being a replacement for the older term ‘geometria situs’?
TOPOLOGY
Named for an Auxerre-born mathematician and physicist, the Fourier Analysis studies the way general functions may be represented by sums of simpler trigonometric functions. They were first used by Joseph Fourier in the study of what, with modern uses including x-ray crystallography and sonar?
HEAT TRANSFER / HEAT CONDUCTION