Mathematics

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