50 Fun Facts About Nerd

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which computer calculates the Ultimate Answer as 42?

Deep Thought, built by hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, spends seven and a half million years computing 42, then admits nobody knows the Question and designs a greater computer, the Earth, to find it.

Which children's author gave the world its first recorded use of the word 'nerd', in 1950?

Dr. Seuss coined it in If I Ran the Zoo (1950), whose narrator wants to collect 'a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too'; Newsweek reported the slang sense in 1951.

Ernő Rubik, inventor of the Rubik's Cube, was a professor of what?

Architecture: Ernő Rubik was teaching at Budapest's College of Applied Arts when he built his Magic Cube in 1974 and applied for a Hungarian patent in 1975.

The first literal computer 'bug', a moth found in 1947, is linked to which pioneer?

Grace Hopper's team taped the moth from the Harvard Mark II into the logbook in 1947; she later wrote the A-0 compiler, helped create COBOL and retired a rear admiral.

Linus Torvalds first released the Linux kernel in which year?

Torvalds announced the kernel on the comp.os.minix newsgroup in August 1991 and posted version 0.01 that September, written for Intel 386 PCs.

Alan Turing did his wartime codebreaking at which British site?

Turing joined the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park in September 1939 and led Hut 8, the section that broke German naval Enigma.

Who first used the Greek letter π for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, in 1706?

William Jones, a Welsh mathematician, introduced π for the ratio in his 1706 Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos; Euler adopted the symbol in the 1730s and made it standard.

Fibonacci introduced his famous sequence to Western mathematics in a 1202 book using which example?

Breeding rabbits: Liber Abaci (1202) asks how many pairs one pair produces in a year if each mature pair bears a new pair monthly, giving 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8.

Which rock-and-roll pioneer is on the Voyager Golden Record alongside Bach and Beethoven?

Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode' is the only rock-and-roll track among the 27 pieces of music on the Golden Record, selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan.

How long after its twin, Voyager 2, did Voyager 1 launch?

About two weeks later: Voyager 2 lifted off on 20 August and Voyager 1 on 5 September, but a faster trajectory carried Voyager 1 past Jupiter and Saturn first.

Schrödinger's cat was proposed in 1935 as a response to a paper by which three physicists?

Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen published their paradox in May 1935; Schrödinger's reply that year put a cat in a box with poison triggered by one radioactive decay, to show superposition turning absurd at everyday scale.

xkcd's tagline describes it as 'a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and' what?

Language completes the tagline. Randall Munroe started xkcd in 2005 by scanning doodles from his old school notebooks, and he says the name is simply a word with no phonetic pronunciation, not an acronym.

In which year was San Diego Comic-Con founded?

1970: Shel Dorf and a group of San Diego fans staged the first Golden State Comic-Con that August at the U.S. Grant Hotel, drawing about 300 attendees.

Dungeons & Dragons was created by Gary Gygax and which co-designer?

Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign supplied the dungeon-crawl ideas that Gygax turned into rules; Tactical Studies Rules published the first boxed set in 1974.

Which linguist wrote The Klingon Dictionary in 1985 and made Klingon sound deliberately alien?

Marc Okrand built Klingon for Star Trek III (1984) from the sounds James Doohan had improvised for the first film, then codified it in The Klingon Dictionary.

Tolkien's Elvish tongue Quenya took its main inspiration from the sound of what?

Finnish: Tolkien said discovering the Kalevala's tongue as a student shaped Quenya's sound and grammar, while its cousin Sindarin was modelled on Welsh.

From 1925 to 1945 Tolkien held a professorship of what at Oxford?

Anglo-Saxon: Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College from 1925, publishing The Hobbit in 1937, before moving to the Merton chair of English in 1945.

Doctor Who first aired on the BBC in which year?

1963: the first episode, An Unearthly Child, went out on 23 November 1963, the day after President Kennedy's assassination, with William Hartnell as the Doctor.

What does TARDIS stand for?

Time And Relative Dimension In Space is how Susan explains the name in the first episode, An Unearthly Child; the plural 'Dimensions' crept in later and both forms have been used on screen.

Frank Herbert's Dune is set on which desert planet?

The book tied for the first Nebula Award for Best Novel and Herbert has said his mushroom-growing hobby fed the idea of the spice.

Which company developed the 2007 puzzle game Portal, home of the AI GLaDOS?

Valve shipped Portal inside The Orange Box in 2007; Ellen McLain voices GLaDOS, who closes the game with Jonathan Coulton's song 'Still Alive'.

In The Legend of Zelda, what is the name of the land Link and Zelda fight to save?

Hyrule is the kingdom of most Zelda games; the 1986 original sends Link across it to gather the eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom and rescue Zelda from Ganon.

How many Pokémon species were in the original pair of Game Boy games released in 1996?

151, from Bulbasaur to Mew: Satoshi Tajiri's Game Freak released Pokémon Red and Green in Japan on 27 February 1996, with Mew hidden in the code as a secret 151st.

Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong, and Mario, after Nintendo failed to license which comic-strip character?

Popeye: Nintendo could not secure the rights, so Miyamoto swapped Popeye, Bluto and Olive Oyl for a carpenter, an ape and a damsel, reusing unsold Radar Scope cabinets in 1981.

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, what does Arthur's squire Patsy bang together to mimic hoofbeats?

Coconut shells: the film could not afford horses, so Patsy clops two halves together, prompting the castle guards' debate over whether a swallow could carry a coconut.

Superman first appeared in issue #1 of which comic, published in April 1938?

Action Comics #1, cover-dated June 1938 and on sale that April, introduced Superman by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, who had sold the character to DC for $130.

Which writer, uncredited for decades, was recognised in 2015 as Batman's co-creator?

Bill Finger wrote Batman's first story and proposed the cowl, cape and the name Bruce Wayne after Bob Kane's early sketch; DC formally credited him in 2015.

Gene Roddenberry pitched the original Star Trek as what 'to the stars'?

Wagon Train: Roddenberry's 1964 pitch sold the series as 'Wagon Train to the stars', a frontier drama whose ship was first named the S.S. Yorktown; NBC ran it from 1966 to 1969.

Leonard Nimoy based the Vulcan salute on a gesture from what?

A Jewish priestly blessing: Nimoy recalled seeing the kohanim form the Hebrew letter shin with their hands in an Orthodox synagogue as a boy, and reused it in 1967's 'Amok Time'.

The no-win Kobayashi Maru test was invented for which Star Trek film?

The Wrath of Khan (1982) opens with Saavik failing the Kobayashi Maru; Kirk later admits he passed only by reprogramming the simulator, earning a commendation for original thinking.

Star Wars was first released in which year?

1977: Fox opened the film in a handful of US cinemas that May, expecting little; it went on to overtake Jaws as the highest-grossing film up to that time.

Han Solo boasts the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than how many parsecs?

Twelve: a parsec is a unit of distance, about 3.26 light-years, not time, so the boast makes no sense as stated; Solo (2018) reframes it as a shorter route.

On which swamp planet does Yoda live in exile in the original trilogy?

Dagobah is the swamp world where Yoda trains Luke in The Empire Strikes Back and dies in Return of the Jedi, aged about 900; Frank Oz voiced and puppeteered him.

The Konami Code was created for the NES port of which 1985 arcade shooter?

Gradius: Kazuhisa Hashimoto found the NES port too hard to test, so he added a cheat granting a full set of power-ups; Contra's 30-lives version made the code famous.

Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris while working at a computing centre in which country?

The Soviet Union: Pajitnov wrote it in 1984 at the Academy of Sciences' computing centre in Moscow, programming it in Pascal on an Elektronika 60 that could draw no graphics, only text characters.

Pac-Man designer Toru Iwatani said he wanted a game that would appeal to whom, unlike war and sports games?

Women: Iwatani said arcades were full of war and sports games for men, so he designed a cute eating game for female players and couples; Namco released it in Japan in May 1980 as Puck Man.

Sheldon and Leonard of The Big Bang Theory are physicists at which real institution?

Caltech, in Pasadena, employs Sheldon, Leonard, Howard and Raj; the show ran 279 episodes on CBS from 2007 to 2019 and spun off Young Sheldon, narrated by Jim Parsons.

Moore's law observes that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly how often?

Every two years: Gordon Moore's 1965 article first said every year, and he revised the pace to a doubling every two years in 1975; it is an empirical trend, not a physical law.

Which mathematician finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem in the 1990s, after a 358-year wait?

Andrew Wiles announced a proof in 1993, repaired a gap with Richard Taylor in 1994, and published in 1995 by proving enough of the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture; Fermat's 1637 marginal note claimed a proof too large to fit.

Magic: The Gathering, released in 1993, was created by which mathematician?

Richard Garfield, a combinatorial-mathematics PhD, designed it for Peter Adkison's Wizards of the Coast, which published the first Alpha set in August 1993.

Who wrote Ender's Game, winner of both the Nebula and Hugo for best novel?

Orson Scott Card expanded his short story from Analog magazine into the 1985 novel, which took the Nebula for 1985 and the Hugo in 1986; its sequel Speaker for the Dead repeated the double.

William Gibson's 1984 debut Neuromancer is a foundational novel of which genre?

Cyberpunk: Neuromancer's hacker Case is hired by the AI Wintermute, and the novel swept the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards, popularising the word 'cyberspace'.

Isaac Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics in which 1942 short story?

Runaround, published in Astounding in March 1942, has the robot Speedy circling a selenium pool on Mercury as the Second and Third Laws conflict; Asimov later added a Zeroth Law.

In Ready Player One, what is the name of the virtual world in which the Easter-egg hunt takes place?

The OASIS is James Halliday's virtual universe; Ernest Cline's 2011 novel, set in 2045, sends Wade Watts after Halliday's hidden Easter egg, and Spielberg filmed it in 2018.

Which company produces the miniature wargame Warhammer 40,000?

Games Workshop, based in Nottingham, launched Warhammer 40,000 in 1987 as Rogue Trader; it is set in the grim 41st millennium and spawned Space Hulk, Necromunda and Kill Team.

In the 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, the 'Nerd' is collected by which narrator for his imaginary zoo?

Gerald McGrew is the boy who imagines replacing the zoo's animals with fantastic creatures, including 'a Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too'; that line is the word's first known appearance in print.

Which 1970s sitcom popularised the word 'nerd' through heavy use?

Happy Days, running from 1974, put 'nerd' in Fonzie's mouth week after week; Saturday Night Live's Nerds sketches followed in 1978 and Revenge of the Nerds in 1984.

Spain's Nerd Pride Day, observed since 2006, falls on 25 May to mark the anniversary of what?

The release of Star Wars is the anniversary: the first film opened on 25 May, and Spanish fans launched Día del Orgullo Friki on that date in 2006; it shares the day with Towel Day, the Douglas Adams tribute.

Which Chamillionaire hit did 'Weird Al' Yankovic parody as 'White & Nerdy'?

Ridin' (2005), Chamillionaire's hit with Krayzie Bone, became 'White & Nerdy' in 2006, Weird Al's first US top-10 single, peaking at number nine.

A 1975 dictionary defined a 'geek' solely as a carnival performer who did what?

Bit the head off a live chicken: the 1975 American Heritage Dictionary entry described a carnival performer whose act was that stunt; the word descends from 'geck', a Low German term for a fool.