100 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 named a creature a Nerd in If I Ran the Zoo (1950); the slang surfaced in Newsweek in 1951, and dictionaries disagree on whether it came from his book.

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

Architecture: Rubik built the first cube from 27 wooden blocks as one of his geometric models, then needed a month to solve it once he had scrambled it.

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.

Which operating system was announced in 1991 as 'just a hobby'?

Linux: Helsinki student Linus Torvalds posted that modest note to a newsgroup in August 1991; his kernel went on to run inside every Android phone.

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.

Welshman William Jones first used π for the circle ratio in 1706, but whose adoption of it made the symbol standard?

Leonhard Euler adopted π a few decades after Jones, and because his textbooks were read across Europe the symbol stuck.

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

Breeding rabbits: Liber Abaci asks how many pairs a single pair produces in a year, but the sequence itself is far older, described by Indian scholars of Sanskrit verse centuries before.

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

Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode' made the cut after one selector sniffed that rock was adolescent and Carl Sagan answered that there are a lot of adolescents on the planet.

Despite its name, which NASA probe launched 16 days before its twin in August 1977?

Voyager 2 lifted off on 20 August 1977 and Voyager 1 on 5 September, but Voyager 1's faster route let it overtake its twin that December and reach Jupiter 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.

Comic-Con began in 1970 in which California city?

San Diego: about 300 fans came to the first three-day Comic-Con at the U.S. Grant Hotel in 1970; by the 2010s it was filling the city's convention centre with more than 130,000.

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 finding a Finnish grammar was like discovering a wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine; his other Elvish tongue, Sindarin, leaned on Welsh.

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

Anglo-Saxon: while holding the chair, Tolkien was marking exam papers when he found a blank page and scribbled 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit'.

Doctor Who debuted the day after which event?

Kennedy's assassination on 22 November 1963 overshadowed the launch, and the BBC repeated the first episode a week later, just before episode two.

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?

Arrakis grew out of a magazine article Herbert never finished, about a US government effort to tame the shifting sand dunes at Florence, Oregon.

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 first sketched Donkey Kong as a game starring which comic-strip character?

Popeye: Miyamoto planned the game around Popeye, Bluto and Olive Oyl, then swapped them for a carpenter, an ape and his girlfriend, reusing unsold Radar Scope cabinets.

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 paid Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster just $130, at $10 a page, for the Superman story now regarded as the first true superhero comic.

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: westerns ruled 1960s TV, so Roddenberry's 1964 pitch promised the same formula in space, a regular cast on one long journey meeting new guest stars each week.

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 took the box-office record from which film?

Jaws lost the all-time record when Star Wars, first released in only a small number of US cinemas, became a blockbuster; E.T. later took the crown from it in turn.

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 Star Wars trilogy?

Dagobah is where Luke, sure it cannot be done, watches Yoda lift his sunken X-wing out of the swamp using only the Force.

The Konami Code debuted in Gradius, but which NES game's 30 lives made it famous?

Contra's 30 lives made the code famous in 1988; Kazuhisa Hashimoto had added it to Gradius because he could not beat the game himself while testing it.

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

The Soviet Union: because he wrote Tetris on the job at a state computing centre, Pajitnov earned no royalties from it until the mid-1990s, after he had moved to the US.

Toru Iwatani said he built Pac-Man around the theme of eating in order to appeal to whom?

Women: Iwatani called arcades gloomy places where only boys hung out, so he designed a cute game to draw in women 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: UCLA physicist David Saltzberg checked the scripts, supplied the equations and diagrams used as props, and sat in on each taping as the show's science adviser.

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 first pitched Wizards of the Coast his board game RoboRally; told it was too risky to publish, he came back with a quick, portable card game for convention downtime.

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 sends washed-up hacker Case on a heist secretly steered by the AI Wintermute; it swept the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards and popularised the word 'cyberspace'.

Under the first of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, what must a robot never do?

Injure a human being, or let one come to harm through inaction: Asimov first spelled the laws out in 1942's 'Runaround', where a robot on Mercury is caught between two of them.

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

The OASIS: its creator James Halliday left a video will promising his fortune and control of the simulation to whoever found the Easter egg he had hidden inside it.

Which company produces the miniature wargame Warhammer 40,000?

Games Workshop began in 1975 with three founders making wooden boards for backgammon and Go, then became the importer that brought Dungeons & Dragons to Britain.

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 on 25 May 1977 set the date; a Spanish blogger launched the day in 2006 with a manifesto of geek rights, asking that fans be taken seriously and not written off as overgrown children.

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

Ridin' won a Grammy after the parody hit; Chamillionaire thanked Weird Al on the red carpet, saying 'White & Nerdy' had made it undeniable that his was the rap song of the year.

Before it meant a tech enthusiast, 'geek' was carnival slang for a performer who did what?

Bit the head off a live chicken: American Heritage still lists that carnival sense beside the modern one, and a word long used as an insult is now worn by many fans as a badge of pride.

Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marston, devised a blood-pressure test that became part of which device?

The lie detector lives on in her magic lasso, which forces anyone it binds to tell the truth. Marston's systolic blood-pressure test became one component of the modern polygraph.

Which Hollywood star co-invented a frequency-hopping guidance system for Allied torpedoes during World War II?

Hedy Lamarr devised it with composer George Antheil to stop the enemy jamming the signal. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, after her death.

Which wireless technology is named after a tenth-century king who united the tribes of Denmark?

Bluetooth was King Harald's epithet, and Intel's Jim Kardach picked it as a codename because the standard would unite rival protocols. Its logo merges the runes for Harald's initials.

The toy company Lego shortened its name from 'leg godt', a Danish phrase that translates as what?

Play well was the wish of Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter from Billund who began making wooden toys in 1932. The plastic bricks came later.

Steve Wilhite, who led the team that created the GIF, said its name should echo a brand of which food?

Peanut butter brand Jif was his model, and CompuServe staff quipped that 'choosy developers choose GIF'. Polls have generally found the hard G more common.

The world's first webcam was pointed at what in the University of Cambridge's Trojan Room computer lab?

A coffee pot was the target, to spare researchers elsewhere in the building a wasted trip to an empty machine. The camera was switched off in 2001 and the last pot was auctioned on eBay.

Which name for a 1 followed by 100 zeros was coined in 1920 by a mathematician's nine-year-old nephew?

Googol was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. Google later took its name from a misspelling of the word, chosen to suggest vast quantities of information.

In the film WarGames, which childhood game teaches the supercomputer WOPR that nuclear war has no winner?

Tic-tac-toe ends in a draw every time the machine plays itself, so it concludes that 'the only winning move is not to play'. It then suggests a nice game of chess instead.

Which Rick Astley hit are internet users tricked into watching when they are 'rickrolled' by a disguised link?

Never Gonna Give You Up became the bait in 2007, when a 4chan user linked its video in place of a Grand Theft Auto IV trailer. The official upload has since passed a billion views.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, what is the most massively useful thing a hitchhiker can carry?

A towel has 'immense psychological value', the Guide insists. Douglas Adams got the idea on his travels, when his own beach towel kept disappearing.

Which British bodybuilder wore Darth Vader's suit on set while James Earl Jones supplied the voice?

David Prowse spoke the lines during filming, but George Lucas wanted a darker voice than his West Country accent. British children already knew him as the road-safety hero the Green Cross Man.

Which tall, furry species from the forest planet Kashyyyk counts Han Solo's co-pilot Chewbacca among its members?

Wookiee design began with George Lucas's own dog, which gave him the idea for a character who was large, furry and intelligent.

In Back to the Future, which component of Doc Brown's DeLorean is what makes time travel possible?

The flux capacitor was nearly called the Temporal Field Capacitor, until director Robert Zemeckis said the name was not believable. It activates when the car reaches 88 mph.

Which Ridley Scott film starring Harrison Ford adapts Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Blade Runner took its title from an unrelated book, simply because Scott liked the name. Dick's novel was later reprinted with the film's title on the cover.

Which song, the first ever sung by a computer, does HAL 9000 perform while being shut down in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Daisy Bell was sung by an IBM machine at Bell Labs in 1961. Arthur C. Clarke saw the demonstration on a visit and wrote it into HAL's slow deactivation.

Which alien collective in Star Trek: The Next Generation warns its targets that 'resistance is futile'?

The Borg absorb other species by injecting nanoprobes and adding cybernetic implants, a process they call assimilation. Individual drones rarely speak; the threat arrives as one collective voice.

In Doctor Who, which planet did the Doctor flee after stealing a time machine from fellow Time Lords?

Gallifrey is a yellow-orange world whose Time Lords are said to have invented time travel. Their young are raised at the Academy inside the Capitol.

In Joss Whedon's Firefly, what is Mal Reynolds's ship called, after the last battle of a war he fought in?

Serenity is named for the Battle of Serenity Valley, which closed the civil war in which Mal and Zoe served. The ship is a small Firefly-class transport, which gives the series its title.

Which author began Frankenstein after Lord Byron challenged his guests to each write a ghost story?

Mary Shelley was stuck for days until a 'waking dream' in the small hours gave her the idea. An astronomer later used the moon's position to date it to 16 June 1816.

Which H. G. Wells novel became a 1938 broadcast of fake news bulletins that alarmed some American listeners?

The War of the Worlds went out live on CBS the night before Halloween, with reports of a Martian invasion breaking into programmes of dance music.

Which Elvish weapon, named by Bilbo Baggins after he fought off giant spiders, glows blue when orcs are near?

Sting is really a large Elvish dagger, but it serves a hobbit well as a sword. Bilbo later passed it on to Frodo for the quest to destroy the One Ring.

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld, which giant turtle carries four elephants and the flat world itself through space?

Great A'Tuin is a Giant Star Turtle of the species Chelys galactica. One of the four elephants has to cock a leg to let the Disc's sun pass by on its orbit.

The word 'robot' was introduced by R.U.R., a 1920 play that Karel Čapek wrote in which Slavic tongue?

Czech gave the play 'robota', the forced labour that serfs owed on their masters' lands. Čapek's robots were living creatures of artificial flesh, closer to what we now call androids.

In Isaac Asimov's Foundation, which mathematician uses psychohistory to predict the Galactic Empire's fall?

Hari Seldon's Plan aims to shorten the dark age that follows to a thousand years. In the series' first published story, from 1942, he appears as a prerecorded hologram.

Which artist co-created Spider-Man and Doctor Strange with Stan Lee, then left Marvel in 1966?

Steve Ditko drew the first 38 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man. Lee had gone to Jack Kirby first, but Ditko said those early pages were nothing like the hero who was published.

Which fictional metal is bonded to the skeleton and claws of the X-Men's Wolverine?

Adamantium is so dense and unbreakable that one scientist chose osmium, the densest known metallic element, as its closest real-world match.

Which physicist, given an alliterative name that Stan Lee found easier to remember, transforms into the Hulk?

Bruce Banner still slipped Lee's mind: later stories called him 'Bob Banner', so the full name became Robert Bruce Banner. The Hulk himself was grey in the debut issue.

Which Art Spiegelman graphic novel about his father's Holocaust survival was the first to win a Pulitzer Prize?

Maus draws Jews as mice, Germans as cats and Poles as pigs. Unsure how to classify it, the Pulitzer committee gave it a Special Award in Letters in 1992.

Dragon Ball's hero Goku is modelled on the Monkey King of which classic sixteenth-century Chinese novel?

Journey to the West gave Akira Toriyama more than a hero: Bulma stands in for the monk Tang Sanzang. He drew Goku as a boy with a monkey's tail rather than a full simian.

In season one of Stranger Things, the boys name the Upside Down's predator after which Dungeons & Dragons monster?

Demogorgon is the game's self-proclaimed Prince of Demons, first published in 1976. The show's creators built an animatronic for the part because they wanted to avoid computer effects.

Which animated series had writer Ken Keeler, who holds a PhD in mathematics, prove a new theorem for one episode?

Futurama needed the proof to untangle a chain of mind swaps in 'The Prisoner of Benda'. The show's head writer called it probably the first theorem ever proven in a television script.

Which Atari game, built by Allan Alcorn as a training exercise, became the first commercially successful video game?

Pong so surprised Atari's founders that they decided to manufacture it. Nolan Bushnell had pretended the simple two-paddle brief was a contract for General Electric.

Which Japanese company created Sonic the Hedgehog as a mascot to compete with Nintendo's Mario?

Sega chose the hedgehog from several designs submitted by its own research and development staff. Artist Naoto Ohshima based him on a prototype programmed by Yuji Naka.

Which id Software shooter sends a lone space marine to fight demons on the moons of Mars and in hell?

Doom spread as shareware, with the first of its three episodes given away free. Its nameless hero was posted to Mars for assaulting an officer who ordered his unit to fire on civilians.

Which NES game's fastest endings revealed that its armoured bounty hunter, Samus Aran, was a woman?

Metroid's twist began as one developer's suggestion midway through the project, which the team voted to adopt. The instruction manuals still referred to Samus as 'he'.

Which online game's 2005 'Corrupted Blood' plague drew epidemiologists studying how people react to outbreaks?

World of Warcraft's plague began as a spell cast by the boss Hakkar the Soulflayer. Players' pets helped carry it, which one researcher compared to bird flu spreading through ducks that show no symptoms.

In the text adventure Zork, which monster eats players who wander into dark areas without a lantern?

A grue took its name from the works of Jack Vance, though the monster itself was original to Zork. IGN later ranked it among the best video game villains.

In Dungeons & Dragons, which die decides whether an attack hits, with its top roll scoring a critical hit?

The d20 lands a critical hit on one roll in twenty, a 5% chance. The third-edition rules designed around the die were opened to other publishers as the d20 System.

Which board game by Klaus Teuber has players trade wool, grain, lumber, brick and ore to build settlements?

Catan started as a much larger game of exploration, which Teuber and his publisher spent two years simplifying. More than 32 million sets had been sold by 2020.

Which world chess champion lost a 1997 rematch to an IBM supercomputer, a first for a reigning title holder?

Garry Kasparov accused IBM of cheating, alleging that a human grandmaster had been behind one of the machine's moves. He had beaten an earlier version of it 4–2 the year before.

Which daughter of the poet Lord Byron wrote what is often called the first published computer program?

Ada Lovelace wrote it as a way for Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. Her father separated from her mother a month after she was born.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which research centre?

CERN needed a way to store and find documents across a large, constantly changing organisation. The proposal Berners-Lee submitted that March did not even give the system a name.

On the web, the joke HTTP status code 418 has a server announce that it is what?

A teapot is the punchline of a 1998 April Fools' Day memo. When a standards chairman tried to retire the code in 2017, a 15-year-old's 'Save 418' campaign kept it alive.

Which unit of data did IBM's Werner Buchholz name with a deliberate respelling, so it would not be confused with 'bit'?

Byte is 'bite' with one vowel changed, so that a slip of the pen could not turn it into the smaller unit. Buchholz coined it in 1956 during early design work on the Stretch computer.

Which physicist's uncertainty principle says a particle's position and momentum cannot both be known precisely?

Heisenberg introduced the idea in 1927, though the formal inequality was derived by Earle Kennard later that year. The effect matters only for microscopic objects.

Which one-sided loop with a half-twist, seen in Roman mosaics, was described by two German mathematicians in 1858?

A Möbius strip cut along its centre line stays in one long piece instead of falling into two. Johann Listing described it in the same year as August Möbius.

Which century-old problem in topology did Grigori Perelman solve before turning down a million-dollar prize?

The Poincaré conjecture had stood since 1904. Perelman also refused the Fields Medal, saying he did not want to be on display 'like an animal in a zoo'.

In Revenge of the Nerds, which fraternity reluctantly takes in the outcast heroes on probation?

The Tri-Lambs are Lambda Lambda Lambda, a Black fraternity whose national leader comes to the heroes' rescue. A real fraternity of that name was founded at the University of Connecticut in 2006.

Which physicist proposed in 1960 that advanced aliens might enclose their star in a shell to capture its energy?

Freeman Dyson took the idea from Olaf Stapledon's novel Star Maker and suggested 'Stapledon sphere' would be the apter name. He later called his famous paper 'a little joke'.

Which Greek scholar, the first known to calculate Earth's circumference, gave his name to a sieve for finding primes?

Eratosthenes became chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. His sieve crosses out the multiples of each prime in turn, so that only primes are left standing.