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70 free Math and Science trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
56 free math and science trivia questions with answers. This math and science trivia set pairs the two subjects that share a classroom wall. Half the questions are about numbers and the people who tamed them: pi, prime numbers, the Fibonacci sequence, Roman numerals, binary, Fermat's Last Theorem, Ada Lovelace and Ramanujan's taxi number. The other half runs through physics, chemistry, biology, earth science and space: the periodic table, DNA, the speed of light, absolute zero, Marie Curie's two Nobel Prizes, penicillin and the age of the universe. The difficulty climbs as you go. The early questions suit a family game night or a middle-school quiz bowl warm-up; the later ones on the Möbius strip, John Wallis and James Chadwick will stretch a science teacher. Every question is multiple choice with a short explanation that adds one extra fact. Each answer has been checked against a primary reference source rather than another trivia list, so a wrong answer key will not derail your quiz night. Want more of one side? BrainPickle also has separate math trivia and science trivia pages, plus science trivia for kids.
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Q 01Pi, about 3.14159, is the ratio of a circle's circumference to which of its measurements?
Its diameter
Because it is irrational, its decimal expansion never ends and never repeats; by the 2020s computers had calculated it to trillions of digits.
Q 02In the Fibonacci sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, what number comes next?
21
Each term is the sum of the two before it, and the pattern shows up in sunflower seed heads, pine cones and the spirals of a nautilus shell.
Q 03The Pythagorean theorem says the square on which side equals the sum of the squares on the other two?
The hypotenuse
The classic 3-4-5 triangle is the simplest whole-number example: 9 plus 16 equals 25.
Q 04The interior angles of any triangle always add up to how many degrees?
180
That is only true on a flat surface; draw a triangle on a sphere, like the Earth, and the angles add up to more.
Q 05A googol is 10 raised to which power?
100
The name was coined by a nine-year-old, mathematician Edward Kasner's nephew, and later inspired the misspelled name of a certain search engine.
Q 06A Möbius strip is a famous example of what kind of surface?
Non-orientable
You can make one by giving a paper strip a half twist and taping the ends; an ant walking along it would cover both "sides" without ever crossing an edge.
Q 07After 358 years of failed attempts, who finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem in 1994?
Andrew Wiles
Fermat had scribbled in a book margin that he had a marvellous proof that the margin was too small to contain; the eventual proof ran to over 100 pages.
Q 08Per the theorem proved by computer in 1976, at most how many colours does any map need so neighbours differ?
Four
It was the first major theorem proved with the help of a computer, and some mathematicians at the time refused to accept a proof no human could check by hand.
Q 09Which 17th-century English mathematician first used the sideways-eight infinity symbol?
John Wallis
The shape is sometimes called a lemniscate, from the Latin for "decorated with ribbons".
Q 10In Roman numerals, what number does the letter M represent?
1000
The system uses just seven letters in total, and there is no symbol for zero.
Q 11In Roman numerals, what number does MCM stand for?
1,900
A smaller numeral placed before a larger one is subtracted, which is why the letters for 100 and 1000 side by side make 900.
Q 12The binary number system used by computers writes every number using only which two symbols?
0 and 1
In binary the number ten is written 1010, and each digit is called a bit, short for binary digit.
Q 13Ada Lovelace's algorithm, called the first computer program, was written for which Babbage machine?
Analytical Engine
Her notes computed Bernoulli numbers, and she was the first to see that such a machine could do more than crunch numbers.
Q 21A gross is a group of how many items?
144
It is a dozen dozens, and a "great gross" is a dozen of those: 1,728.
Q 22Goldbach's conjecture, still unproven, says every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two of what?
Prime numbers
It has been checked by computer for every even number up to four quintillion, yet no one has proved it holds for all of them.
Q 23What is the smallest prime number?
2
It is also the only even prime, since every other even number can be divided by two.
Q 24Which Swiss mathematician introduced much of modern notation, including the concept of a function?
Q 14A perfect number equals the sum of its proper divisors. What is the smallest one?
6
The next one is 28, and nobody has ever found an odd perfect number, or proved that none exists.
Q 15Euclid, the "father of geometry", is chiefly known for which treatise?
Elements
Written around 300 BC, it was used as a standard textbook for more than two thousand years.
Q 16Which mathematician was honoured after his death with a medal calling him the "Prince of Mathematicians"?
Carl Friedrich Gauss
As a schoolboy he reportedly summed the numbers 1 to 100 in seconds by pairing them into 50 pairs of 101.
Q 17Hypatia, the celebrated ancient philosopher and mathematician, lived and taught in which city?
Alexandria
She was murdered by a mob in 415 AD, and her death is often treated as a symbol of the end of classical learning.
Q 181729 is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two of what, in two different ways?
Cubes
G. H. Hardy had arrived by taxi number 1729 and called it dull; Ramanujan instantly saw it as 1³ + 12³ and 9³ + 10³.
Q 19Katherine Johnson, whose calculations were critical to early US crewed spaceflights, worked for which organisation?
NASA
John Glenn reportedly asked for her to check the computer's numbers by hand before he would fly his 1962 orbital mission.
Q 20What is the square root of 2, to three decimal places?
1.414
It is the length of the diagonal of a square with sides of 1, and legend says the Pythagoreans were horrified to discover it cannot be written as a fraction.
Leonhard Euler
He kept producing roughly a paper a week even after going almost completely blind, dictating his work to assistants.
Q 25In which year was Isaac Newton's Principia first published?
1687
Edmond Halley, of comet fame, paid for the printing himself after the Royal Society ran out of money.
Q 26Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for which discovery?
The photoelectric effect
The prize citation pointedly did not mention relativity, which was still considered too controversial by parts of the committee.
Q 27Who was the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice?
Marie Curie
Her two prizes were in different sciences, physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911, a feat no one else has matched.
Q 28By 2010, how many entries on the periodic table were known, completing its first seven rows?
118
Only about 94 of them occur naturally on Earth; the rest have been made in laboratories, often lasting a fraction of a second.
Q 29Which is the lightest and most abundant chemical element in the universe?
Hydrogen
It makes up about three quarters of all normal matter, and stars like the Sun shine by fusing it into heavier atoms.
Q 30Which element has the chemical symbol Au?
Gold
The symbol comes from the Latin word aurum, and the metal is so soft that a single gram can be beaten into a sheet a square metre wide.